It's up...

Those changes look incredible, can't wait to test it.

You nerfed the higher spells? Why?

Changes look good, going to take her for a spin.. soon as I figure out where my missing magicka went. I suspect 1.3.

Because several people said 10 and 15 seconds of paralysis was overpowered. Same with constant stunlocking.
As for Dragonhide, that was to fix a bug in which you couldn't cast it when other protection spells were cast. (Boo! Hiss! We hate bugs!) It still provides max armor for clothies, a nice armor bonus for armor wearers, and it now lasts longer if you perk up alteration. (Oh, and I keep forgetting, casting time was reduced to 1.5 seconds)

Trying to make sure magic is fun and interesting, and still packs enough punch to keep up with other play styles as opposed to paralyze/stunlock and slowly whittling the enemies down, rinse, repeat.

So what do the Conjuration and illusion esps do? Sorry, I might have missed it.

I don't think he got to illusion and conjuration yet.

Good work so far. Am using balanced 1.2 for now. I like stun locking but I can get over once new versions come out with all spells schools covered. I don't suppose you could cap enchanting a little beneathe its natural 200% efficiency? That being 100 skill and all enchanting perks. Like make the perk Enchanter only make you get 10% per perk level.

The newest version has esps for conjuration and illusion.

So, is it possible to make the Spell and Perk Nerfs optional?

Not all of us think stuff is OP, I'll just stay with 1.2

EDIT: OK, After reading some comments about the reasoning behind the Paralyze and Perk Nerfs, I think I'll give 1.3 a spin....

The illusion and conjuration esps only change the novice perk so it makes all of the spells of that school cheaper.

Congrats for the update. Now patiently waiting for the ward tweaks

Actually, no... the illusion, conjuration, and restoration .esps currently add in cost modifiers with the first perk depending on how much and what type of armor you are wearing.

Oh, yeah it wasn't clear. Maybe I missed it in the readme. Sorry.

So how would I go about switching from IDM to this? While I really enjoyed my time with IDM, it doesn't seem to be getting any more attention and this is going to be a COMPLETE magicka overhaul when it's done. The problem I foresee is that I've spent perks on the multi-tiered damage increasers for each element. I imagine when I switch it out I will lose those perks?

I don't have a huge problem with starting over. My mage is only level 26, and that would give me a chance to try out Xoda's leveling mod too .

There's a Perk Reset mod available, only requires Script Dragon to work properly. Refunds your level-1 perk points when activated and used. Since I've been playing with mods like ID and this one, I've used it more than once to balance my character back out against the changes.

And you don't have to completely restart your character.

Cool, thanks!

Someone at Skyrim Nexus brought up an interesting point - they felt like the alteration spells are a little too boring, and asked if I could implement leveling protection spells (much as I did with the destruction spells) so that a master mage could have an assortment of useful protections to choose from. The suggestion was stonger spells with shorter durations vs. weaker spells with longer durations. I pulled out my trusty spreadsheet and tinkered around.

What if... Novice protection spell provided armor only, scaling up as you perk up the tree so that total armor bonus (for cloth) is 40/80/143/227/316/379 (no perks/novice/etc. up to master) with increasing duration from 60 secs up to 135 (as they all are right now)
Apprentice spell offered 30/60/106/169/235/281 armor but additionally resistance to some type of damage (poison? fire? frost? pick one) that also scaled so 10%/20%/36%/57%/79%/94% with the same scaled duration. Less armor, but some resistance.
Adept spell offered a different type of resistance, but worked pretty much the same as Apprentice
Expert also works pretty much the same, but with 2 resistances and for a slightly shorter duration
Master (being a master spell) offers higher armor, ideally reaching the armor cap at mastery, all resistances (but lower %s than the other resistance spells) and a much shorter duration. ie. your boss fight spell.

Do you guys like the idea at all?

^ Yes. Yes. Yes.

An interesting idea, but seems to complicate what is otherwise an effective and simple solution. It still seems like a Master Alteration mage, would opt for either Expert or Master level spells, essentially making the lower tiers useless for stronger mages (as they currently are).

There are already magic resist (and absorb) perks in the Alteration tree, so those bases are covered. I would leave the armor timers alone, and simply add scaling elemental/poison resistances (or reflections) as the spells get stronger. Novice can have 1, Apprentice 2, Adept 3, Expert 4, and Master can both resist and reflect. OR, have each type resist all elemental/poison attacks, scaling up from Novice. (basically scaling up like armor level does).

The danger you run into by setting one type of resistance on one armor spell, is that the player *cannot* disspell themselves to put on a lower tier spell with a new resistance. And you don't want to lock yourself into only one resistance when there are several out there.

I also dislike the "boss armor spell" idea, since it essentially shortens something like Dragonhide back to <2 minutes, making it a spell you can only use when you *know* you have a tough fight coming. You can't run around with it on as your primary defensive spell, due to having to recast so often. Unless of course, you buff Ebonyflesh up enough to compensate.

And - any spell meant to last for a duration that isn't a damage spell or damage shield, is useless with a timer less than 2 minutes. A long time ago a MMO called Asheron's Call had super short buff spells - mages were constantly casting them over and over to keep them up, and it was a major hassle. There was no strategic reason to cut them so short, other than to annoy the characters and place them in unnecessary danger because their "shield suddenly dropped". That's about as fun as dealing with browser popups.

Compare to a warrior that perked half the smithing tree, and half the heavy armor tree (i.e. almost one complete tree). They get to stand around, 100% of the time, with 100% armor on for 80% effective full-time protection. If you perk most of the alteration tree you get a similar effect (in BM 1.3), but still have to recast and spend magicka on a regular basis. If you drop those timers even further, armor becomes a combat only consideration, and you will get jumped running around without armor on.

Less annoying, more reliable is my vote. If you want more "exciting" alteration defense, make elemental protection spells. Don't go and hack up the reliable armor spells we now have.

True true... there seem to be (at least) two schools of thought on protection spells; some want long lasting spells they don't have to put a lot of effort into maintaining, and others feel mages should require more strategy and management (they are the thinkers, after all) and that juggling spells makes things more interesting.

Regardless of which end of that spectrum you fall on, the fact remains that the UI in skyrim is clunky, and juggling spells as of right now is a hassle (hotkeys notwithstanding - and since I can't stand how they handled mouse input, I've been playing with a controller which doesn't even give me that!) so I wanted to make sure the normal "armor" spell (in the example above, oakflesh) has a decently long duration to be maintained without too much effort.

You're right - there is already elemental protection and spell resistance/absorption in the perks, so maybe that's not the best route to go for offering variety. I like the reflection idea...

379 (for fully scaled up oakflesh) seems like fairly decent armor for cloth - granted, it's not armor cap, but that's the downside of cloth compared to armor. (While armor has the higher casting costs and unless you get the perk, increased weight and slower movement speed) and could be maintained... 4 1/2 minutes as some basic, maintainable protection. (Much longer if dual cast, especially with the novice version of the mod which makes it last 13.5 minutes!)

281 + some other bonuses yet to be determined for... maybe 3 minutes (up to a max of 9 minutes dual cast with novice version)

and max armor + other goodies for... 2 minutes or so (can't be dual cast)

It's just a thought, and I'm not in a hurry to dive in and start recoding. (I wanted to take at least 1 day off!)

Oh... and also, yes. I need to figure out how to make casting a new protection spell dispel any current protection spell. I wanted to do that as part of the bug fix for stacking protection spells that exists now. Obviously, it would be even more important if you were switching spells more frequently to take advantage of different bonuses.

This was beautiful. Poetry.

Is this compatible with Xodarap777's Destruction Spells mod?

Probably not...

It looks like Destruction Spells adds a bunch of extra spell books to the game so you can buy novice/apprentice/etc. versions of each spell. Balanced Magic causes the spells to actually improve as you take perks so by the time you hit mastery, you still only have 18 destruction spells, but they are ALL at master level (instead of 70 spells that are all different levels as with the Destruction Spells mod).

Looks like some very nice changes in 1.3 mysty! Thank you for working on this.

As to protection design ideas:

- damage resistance (physical, and magic (fire, frost, shock), are passive by nature and thus for game play fun should be on a very long duration spell. As others have pointed out, any passive defense spell will just wind up getting cast over and over and over by the user. Passive defense via spells is the main reason every mage is not a heavy armor wearing battlemage. It has to be competive with heavy armor if it is to be balanced. On paper I think what you got looks great. I would not change it.

- stuns, imobilizes, holds, knockback - these are all active defense activities that can be combined with or used instead of passive defense. They are by nature alot more fun, but can be more frustrating because traps, archers, or hidden enemies can one shot a mage that doesnt employ passive defense. This area is lacking in vanilla skyrim.

The best approch I have found is to combine both passive and active defense to give the most fun user experience. A base level of passive defense in Skyrim is very important to prevent mages from getting one-shotted by archers, but if a mage is surrounded by 3 melee fighters at least 2 of these should be crowd controlled to allow the mage to survive the fight. Currently only illusion and paralysis provides any sort of crowd control. I think that is too few options, and alteration could use some novice/apprentice crowd control spells to help out (along with wards getting fixed to actually be useful). The nerfing of the impact perk will make these spells even more important.