No; they are 'compatible' in terms of being able to use both ESP's, but you'd end up with a crazy powerful caster if you did that. The math behind the two is actually fairly similar if you look at where the damage #'s end up for the spells (except for runes, Master level runes in Xodarap's do crazy damage by the numbers). You do lose some of the wacky effects that Xodarap was doing, such as HUGE radius fireballs and the like. This may be good or bad depending on your point of view.

The one good thing about Xodarap's approach is that it takes money out of the game, and anything that takes money out of the game is a good thing IMO. On the other hand it's bad because you end up with a hundred spells in your spell list, 90% of which you won't use at the end game. Xodarap's new spells also currently do not gain the benefits of dual casting.

Destruction provides crowd control too.

Long-duration spells are inherently unbalanced with the magicka regeneration system. If you can cast them and your magicka pool is full again long before they expire, why do they even HAVE a magicka cost? There are a couple of ways to mitigate this. Personally, I'm in favor of reducing all regeneration to the in-combat rate for several reasons, and it would help here as well. Better still would be much lower regeneration and either larger pools or cheaper spells, so that magicka actually feels like a resource, but there are a lot of potential complications down that road (mainly scope creep & mod compatibility). My favorite idea so far was to give long-duration spells a constant magicka cost, so having them up effectively reduces your regeneration rate. It'd take some fine tuning, but this seems like the option that requires changing the fewest other things to compensate/accommodate.

To the OP, if it's possible, could you please keep all the "Make the game harder" options, Optional, not all of us enjoy masochistically difficult self-nerfing gameplay, and
have more fun when things are kept optional so a person can pick and choose to their personal taste what a mod does.
That would keep everybody happy.

To be fair, not everyone enjoys godmode either, which is what 100% stagger is

But I understand having more options is always good.

Seems like scrolls are affected by the destruction perks (more damage), but their base values haven't been changed, making them much more powerful than the corresponding spells. Intended? Or just something on my installation?

Not intended, it's a bug. Thank you for pointing it out, I'll try to make sure it's fixed by the next update.

As the name of the mod implies, I'm trying to walk that very fine line of making the game more "balanced." That means that I'm strengthening areas of the game that I believe were underpowered, and weakening the areas that seem overpowered. That's what the mod does. It may not make everybody happy - but it certainly tries to find the right middle ground. Because it's very painstaking and time consuming to make changes to game mechanics without the creation kit, I have chosen to focus my time and energy on trying to make the best "balanced" mod I can, one that doesn't make the game easier or harder (that's what the difficulty settings should be for... and the issues with those are beyond the scope of this mod), but offers more flexibility when it comes to trying different styles of play.

Destruction *shouldn't* be a one trick pony relying solely on stunlock, hybrid classes *shouldn't* be just as good at magic as someone who has dedicated all of their perk points to magic, and paralysis *shouldn't* be so long lasting that there's still 5 seconds left on it after the victim is dead! If you feel like you need those specific mechanics to play on a reasonable difficulty setting... then maybe this just isn't the right mod. :/

Respectful counterpoint: IMO scrolls need to be dramatically more powerful than equivalent spells, otherwise they're pretty much pointless. A one-shot, non-craftable item that costs as much as most staffs? Please give me a good reason not to just sell it.

I was about to say the same thing, heh.

True that... except I can give a good reason not to just sell it. Warriors. Pure melee or assassin characters rarely skill up magic for different reasons. To them, scrolls can be useful. Granted - they are the least likely people to download and install a magic balancing mod, but it stands nevertheless.

Just installed this mod. I'm pretty pleased with the changes. I have two issues though.

The first is that my Staff of Fireballs is displaying 89 damage while my spell shows 98. I believe this might have something to do with the alteration perks that affect other schools not being applied to staves.

The second is that the bonus being applied to restoration also affects the bonuses given by enchantments. This seems to me like an unintended, unbalanced side effect, even though the overall impact is probably pretty minor. Just because of this alone my equipment is giving me an additional 20% magicka regen bonus, 13 magicka, and 1% cost reduction for all schools. Not a big deal, really.

I did some playing with 1.3 on a pure mage. Level 65, 100 in most magic schools. I enchanted some new clothes so I dont have any fortify(magic school) cost reductions and went to a dungeon to test it out.
I have about 900 magicka and 300% total mana reduction using the Adept esp for mana regen and impact bonus. I play on expert diff. I have the alteration tree fully perked except for dual casting and most of the destruction tree.

Dragon skin is very much a master level spell, and now replaces ebonyskin completly. I can now ignore armor and not worry about an archer killing me cause I am at 50% health, or getting one shotted by a giants club swing. I love the uptime on the armors now, but I think it would be better to change them to toggles that reduce your max magicka, the novice->master perks could reduce the cost of the armors instead of duration. Alteration is now better than heavy armor for a mage. But I can still see value in a heavy armored battle mage.

I think the magic cost increase of wearing armor is probably too small. Of course until the fortify magic school enchants are nerfed they are currently meaningless. Whatever value you think you want to nerf the fortify schools to should probably be the cost of wearing armor. That way a battlemage could use the fortifys to negate the armor cost. (ie each piece is a 5% cost increase, then fortify destruction caps at 5% per piece with a grand soul).

The damage per mana and damage per cast of the destruction spells are just about right. I am not one shotting or stun locking the harder critters, but I am not tickling them either. Destruction seems to be a very good alternative to archery. The magic cost premium for doing more damage (expert level spells) is defenetly evident, and probably balanced so I dont consider it a problem. It does add some thought to a fight. I probably cant just double cast the boss mob with my big guns unless I want to svck down potions, is there other ways to take him down and be more mana efficient?

Paralaze with 100 alteration and a fully perked tree lasts a long time. But paralyze could only last 2 seconds and still be overpowered because its effect is so strong. Boss critters resist this so I dont think its a big deal to be able to drop minions like this. When the CK comes out it may be better to change it so that paralyze can be broken by damage. Maybe 1% chance per 10 points of damage?

Without the 100% stun of impact I am less reliant on it and more focused on how to slow/calm/kite the mob. Its still valuable with spells like Ice storm. I am now very much looking forward to the master of minds perk to help out with some crowd control.

I found two more issues with Dragonhide. Firstly, the spell's armor rating is blank in the description, and when casting it does not override an active ebony armor effect.

I never saw them as an option when playing my 2-hand nord warrior. There are too expensive for a one shot weapon. I think they should be much cheaper.

Regarding the armor disvussion I have onyl one request: A mage should not be able to rival a fully perked heavy armor guy in terms of protection. Otherwise armor becomes pointless.

In vanilla the only reason a mage should not wear full heavy armor is because of role play reasons (the worst way to balance a game). Heavy armor even with minimal perking allows the wearer to get to the AR softcap of 567. A few weight reduction enchants or the steed stone and armor has no downside. So I dont even understand your statement a mage should not be able to rival a fully perked heavy armor guy, when in fact every mage SHOULD be a heavy armor guy in vanilla skyrim.

With mystys changes mages now have a valid choice. Alteration at master levels fully perked provides as much defense as heavy armor with a few perks. The cost of alteration is recasting the armor which may drop during a key point in a fight. Heavy has the added weight, but no recasting issue. Now alteration and heavy armor are properly balanced.

Balance is not about feelings, its about numbers and giving the players interesting choices.

Well, the mod reduces the magical capabilities of a heavy armored battlemage by reducing the magicka regeneration, which is a good idea. I would even raise the penalties a bit more. Pur cloth mages have the advantage of better magical capabilities + better magical enchantments on their clothes. If they can gain the same protection from physical attacks without much downsides, what's the point of a battlemage then? As I understand it magicka is not much of an issue with the proper perks, enchantments and potions. And recatsing in time shouldn#t be an issue after moders figure out how to add temporary effect icons to the hud, which Bethesda seems to have forgotten.

Definitely going to disagree here. If you spend as much time working up skills and as many points investing in perks, either route should give the same effective benefits. If not, then there becomes no choice if you want to be as good as you can, and you'd always chose the stronger route. If magical defense was always sub-par to physical defense (because people believed that's how it should be), there would be very few people using magic defense.

Just to toss some other lore out there, not that it blends with Skyrim or means much overall - but in Middle Earth, Gandalf battled a balrog, something that he claimed none of the others in the fellowship (all physical combat types) could stand against.

I think there's a general misconception that we're working against here, which is that mages in robes should be easy to kill. That shouldn't be the case in a game where offensive and defensive combat prowess are something we attempt to balance for all people playing. If you take away power, you have to give back a lot of utility or options. Beth has simplified the game (and magic) to such an extent, that that is no longer possible.

Just wondering if you would consider releasing a version that has lower scaling for damage (30% per perk instead of 50% maybe) and higher base damage/mana use. Enemy mages are significantly weaker now. They are doing more damage to me with daggers than spells because of perk dependancies.

You're right

This started out to be the right mod for me, but has moved in a direction that doesn't work for me anymore.
I'll keep an eye on this mod though, especially when the CK comes out, until then, I'm moving on to something else.

Hmm... NPCs actually get their own seperate leveled spell list - as far as I can tell, the mod shouldn't affect NPC casters at all. Is there a specific NPC that seems weaker or just all of them?

Mysty, I posted in tejon's thread about this and haven't received a response yet. Based on the conversation between you and he in there, are your two mods compatible? I really don't know how to interpret what was discussed there, haha.

I'm sorry it's not what you were looking for. Maybe when the CK comes out it will be much easier to create variations. Regardless, thanks for trying it out and letting me know what you think. Happy gaming!

I haven't tried his mod yet (to keep bug testing more straightforward, I'm not running any other mods on my machine yet) but from what he said, it sounds like they are... mostly. You may want to adjust load order to ensure you get the magic cost changes you prefer as both mods change them in slightly different ways.

Alright. Good to know -- thanks!

^{As a side note, I'm getting this a lot, hah..:
[#103128] The administrator has limited the number of new posts you can submit within a short time frame. Please wait 60 seconds before replying or posting a new topic.}

Ehh... in TES terms, Gandalf was more akin to Vivec than a mere PC.

Different characters should play differently. Mages should be just as capable of surviving as other characters, but achieving this by simply giving everyone the same passive armor total makes DamageResist a pointless attribute. You might as well not have it, and instead directly scale damage according to the player's level. There are just more interesting ways of creating survivability. Wards, for instance, seem to be a whole lot of untapped potential.

I'll check into this more as I go..noticed it when doing the hagraven quest. Witches doing around 15 damage (no resistance here) with projectile spells which I figured meant zero perks..but if they have their own list..I'm confused now. Will have to see what happens as I advance. No plans on uninstalling the mod though its great work, just a minor gripe about the damage scaling.