User:Kelmych/MagicPack

Improving the Magic User Experience (and Survival) in Skyrim

Introduction

I've played as a magic user in all the Elder Scrolls games since Daggerfall (TES1). The combat magic system in all the TES games has been too underpowered to play a character that uses magic as the primary skill vs. using it at the beginning of a battle with the bulk of the fight using archery or melee. Conjuration is about the only area where the Skyrim magic system is almost always helpful. The key problems have been:

• lack of some good area effect spells. In D&D games mage survival depended on getting the Fireball spell as soon as possible, but vanilla TES doesn't have similar spells;
• lack of a good set of illusion spells that distract, confuse or redirect enemy attention (e.g., D&D includes spells like Blur, spells that creates multiple copies of the player and various invisibility spells) with enemies of comparable level to the character; the Skyrim spells are underpowered and in addition are often limited to use with low level enemies);
• few if any spells that can keep enemy NPCs from closing to melee range;
• running out of Magicka long before enemy NPCs are significantly wounded, incapacitated, or killed;
• mage-specific armor, typically robes, even with with buff spells is ineffective against enemy melee and archer NPCs;
• buffing spells don't often provide any enough advantage to battlemage characters to make up for any significant investment in magic perks and magicka.

Enchantment has an inherent tradeoff between allowing users to create very strong enchantments on worn and wielded objects, potentially reducing the value of quests for powerful artifacts, and having artifacts that are much more powerful than any items created with enchantment spells:

• prior to Skyrim, enchantment spells don't actually add much protection to armor/clothing relative to the protection from major artifacts in the game;
• pure vanilla Skyrim allows game-breaking object enchantments using combinations of potions and Fortify spells to raise the smithing and enchantment skill level.

Skyrim made some changes that affect these, but introduced some problems of it's own:

• there are still no effective area spells that can be cast at a specific center point and affect multiple NPCs;
• staggering (based on the destruction magic impact perk) and shouts help to keep enemies out of melee range, but stagger is a little overpowered and shout effects don't last long;
• potions provide their full effect immediately, and are thus overpowered since they can be consumed too frequently;
• spells and potions can be used in combination to gets short duration raises in the enchanter, restoration, and alchemy skill levels to ridiculously high levels, allowing the creation of extremely overpowered armor, weapons, and potions; this improves the value of the Enchantment magic skill but it unfortunately becomes overpowered;
• enemy NPC mages have seemingly unlimited magicka, and enemy melee fighters have seemingly unlimited stamina; and
• if the exploit of multiple potion/spell combinations to allow overpowered enchanting is eliminated, enchanting isn't typically very useful.

The idea of a Magic-related STEP Pack was initially suggested in this post, and the Old School Adventuring pack thread also has some useful discussion of magic-related mods as do some of the SkyRe related posts in the STEP forums. The mods in the magic pack would include mods of the overall magic system including enchantment and alchemy. This pack would be intended to provide a set of mods that makes playing as a magic user feasible but still quite challenging. The pack would likely include some of the mods listed below plus other mods suggested by STEP forum users.

Mods

There are four categories of spell mods,

• mods that change all or part of the skill perk trees,
• mods that don't change perks but change vanilla spells or effects,
• mods that only add new spells or effects (typically compatible with other magic mods), and
• mods that provide various or capabilities that support using magic (typically compatible with all the magic mods).

Some mods that change parts of a skill tree or effects and costs of the vanilla spells, enchantments, and potions can be made compatible, but this isn't always easy.

This is a partial list of relevant mods that I'm aware of. Many of these are in Skyrim Gems which includes a short discussion of the mod capabilities.

Magic Mods affecting perk trees:

• Empowered Magic: makes significant changes to the magic school perks, fixes stagger overpower issue, provides large set of changes to vanilla spell cost and power progression with caster level.

Magic Mods changing the Vanilla spells but not the magic perks:

• Mighty Magick: fixes stagger overpower issue, moves some spells across magic schools to fix the magic school part of the enchanting/alchemy overpower issue, changes light-creating spells to on/off, provides large set of changes to vanilla spell cost and power progression with caster level, adds large set of purchasable new spells across multiple spell caster skill levels. The mod is modular by Skyrim spell category, but Iroha created a merged esp plugin covering all updates through 3.15 and Kelmych updated it to include 3.16 (the final update). This updated Mighty Magick AOI plugin is available.here; it has been initially tested but not extensively tested.
• Balanced Magic: (Kryptopyr's favorite) provides large set of small changes to vanilla spell cost and power progression with caster level, and also adds a few new spells. There is a lot of similarity (and thus overlap) between the changes in Balanced Magic, Better Magic, and the parts of Mighty Magick that change vanilla spells.
• Better Magic: provides a large set of small changes to spells and spell progression (e.g., stagger happens only 1/3 of the time) to better balance and improve magic use.

Magic Mods that include only new spells:

• Apocalypse: adds a large set of new spells across multiple spell caster skill levels which can be purchased or, sometimes, be discovered;
• Midas Magic: (updated plugin on this page) adds large set of new spells across multiple spell caster skill levels including area spells and a "magic luggage" type spell, with spell books created at a Midas forge using gold plus various other ingredients;
• The Revenge of Colette: adds a new and fairly unique set of spells and spell "stances" (somewhat like shouts), with spells and stances discovered as part of an unmarked quest;
• Forgotten Magic/Forgotten Magic Redone: adds new spells (which level up as character progresses) learned by killing enemies with spells, but these new spells don't support staggering from the impact perk;
• ACE Magic: adds magic "casting forms" somewhat similar to the "stances" above; and
• Phenderix Magic Evolved: adds very large set of new spells, some based on non-TES lore.

Mods that change aspects of Enchanting and/or the capabilities of artifacts:

• Enchanting Awakened: makes major changes in enchanting and the Soul Trap spell to provide better balance;
• Enchantment Balance Overhaul:
• ACE Enchanting: changes enchanting perks, eliminates ability to craft some potions that allow the enchantment overpower issue;
• EzEs -Artifact Disenchanting: allows removing enchantments form items;
• NPC Enchantments Fix: Creates a SkyProc patch that allows NPCs and followers to make use of the enhancements on objects; and
• Artifact Rebalance (available on Mighty Magick page): increases the stats of major game artifacts.

Mods that change aspects of Alchemy and using or creating potions (this doesn't include the large set of mods whose only use is to change potions from instant to having duration; this functionality is included in the larger scale mods listed here):

• Miko's Alchemy & Food Overhaul: newer mod that rebalances potion creation and potion/food effects, and has some improvements over Phitts;
• Phitts Alchemy and Food Overhaul: older but still good mod that does some rebalancing of portion and food effects;
• Chemistry - An Alchemy Overhaul: changes alchemy to use cocktails of mixed ingredients to creaet potions.
• Dynamic Potions: (typically compatible with other alchemy mods) changes duration, strength, and weight of potions, including an MCM menu;
• Harvest Overhaul: increases the number of ingredients harvested from plants and dead creatures; and
• The Big Book of Alchemy v2: adds 3 books of recipes that can be found (rare item) or purchased from a few merchants.

Mods that change to look and/or capabilities of clothing/armor and equipment intended for use by mages:

• EotW Mage Robes of Skyrim: vanilla robes are too drab with little variety, these lore friendly robes are much better and provide some reasonable diversity; and
• EcthelionOtW Mage Equipment Overhaul: lore friendly makeover of the textures for vanilla objects used by mages.

Utilities that make it easier to play as a magic user:

• More Hotkeys Please!: allows automatic casting of sequences of spells, and equipping of spells, armor, weapons, and potions; all this is configured in MCM. It's hard to be a mage without this utility mod. I'm working on a tutorial for it since the existing tutorial was created before the mod supported MCM.
• Skyrim -Community- Uncapper : already in STEP but included here since it needs a SKSE_Elys_Uncapper.ini configuration file designed for mage characters.

Mods that add new Magic College Quests:

• Cutting Room Floor, which will be in STEP 2.2.9, adds some magic college quests that were cut by Bethesda before they were completed. Unfortunately there aren't any other mods that adds magic college quests. In addition, the vanilla game doesn't have any radiant quests for magic except for the quest to fetch items to be enchanted and there aren't any mods that add these.