http://skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=2275

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The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Balanced Magic v1.30
by mysty
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Included Files
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Balanced_Destruction.esp - allows all destruction spells to scale
Balanced_Alteration.esp - changes the alteration perk tree and how the protection spells work
Balanced_Conjuration.esp
Balanced_Illusion.esp
Balanced_Restoration.esp

(Choose only one of the below - optional if you prefer vanilla settings or other mods which adjust these values)
Balanced_Magic_Novice.esp - 75% combat magicka regen, 3x dual cast damage, 2.2x dual cast cost, -55% spell cost at skill level 100
Balanced_Magic_Adept.esp - 60% combat magicka regen, 2.6x dual cast damage, 2.4x dual cast cost, -51% spell cost at skill level 100
Balanced_Magic_Master.esp - 45% combat magicka regen, 2.2x dual cast damage, 2.6x dual cast cost, -46% spell cost at skill level 100
Vanilla Settings (for comparison) - 33% combat regen, 2.2x dual cast damage, 2.8x dual cast cost, -40% spell cost at skill level 100

I've also attached an excel spreadsheet with data on specific numbers used. You may enter a skill level in the yellow box to see updated multipliers for skill based magicka cost.


Installation
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1- Extract the desired .esp files to your "Skyrim/Data" folder
2- Launch Skyrim
*Note: If you have a previous version of this mod installed, be sure to uncheck it in your Data Files, and that only the .esp files listed above are running!


Purpose
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This mod is intended to make pure mages a force to be reckoned with in battle. While melee fighters get increased damage as they improve their primary offensive skill, mages simply get reduced casting cost. When you consider the options to improve weapons via smithing, enchanting, and poisons - heavily armored warriors are far outclassing squishy mages in damage. Dual wielding melee fighters with power attacks and rogues with sneak attacks have a major offensive advantage. Additionally, pure mages must use their magicka for both offensive and defensive skills, meaning that many of the master level spells can be prohibitively expensive without enchanting all gear for reduced magicka cost. Since pure mages don't have enchantable weapons, there is less gear to enchant, and I believe the player should be able to diversify their enchantments without losing the ability to deal reasonable high end damage.

This mod attempts to address these issues without making Mages overpowered; magical damage already ignores armor, and offers area of effect damage, and damage over time that stacks with other damage - even at maximum level, the best spells should not necessarily do as much damage as well smithed, enchanted, and poisoned weapons would. If you want to be incredibly overpowered, this may not be the mod for you!


Change Log
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v1.30
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- The Impact perk from the Destruction tree now causes stagger to occur only 50% of the time
- Paralyze has been reduced to 6 seconds (was 10)
- Mass Paralysis has been reduced to 10 seconds (was 15)
- Protection spells were restored to original base values (40/60/80/100) and Dragonhide was given a base value of 120
- Consequently, you can now cast Dragonhide and override lesser protection spells.
- Protection spells gain bonus armor if you are not wearing armor on your body, hands, or feet. This means you can still get a partial bonus if you are wearing only 1 or 2 pieces of armor. Dragon masks (and helmets) do not affect the bonus armor.
- Wearing armor now affects casting cost for all schools of magic. Each piece of light armor worn increases cost by 4%, and each piece of heavy armor increases cost by 6%. (Additive, not multiplicative.)
- Alteration perks (novice - master) each increase the duration of alteration spells by 25% of the original duration. Protection spells, for instance, begin at 60 seconds, but will last 135 seconds once you reach Master Alteration (without the Stability perk).
- The stability perk was reduced to 2x (from 2.5x)
- Three new perks replace the obsolete Mage Armor perks - they are called "Less Is More"
- The first rank decreases casting cost of all schools of magic by 10%
- The second rank increases either magnitude or duration of most spells by 5% (this will be adjusted as I look more closely at other schools to see what the best approach is, and how I could make all spells "more effective")
- The third rank decreases casting cost of all schools by another 5% and increases effectiveness by another 5%

v1.20
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- BUG FIX! Destruction staves now level concurrenty with spells.
- Master destruction spells now have a 1 second delay before casting (hopefully a nice compromise)
- Now modular. Each school of magic has its own .esp, and there are 3 difficulty settings for balance preferences.

v1.10
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- BUG FIX! This mod no longer scales effects from enchantments or alchemy. Only the spells will level. Spell damage can still be increased with potions. I have left the Augmented perks alone for now, so those still affect enchanted items as they do in vanilla.
- Master destruction spells no longer have the preparation time before casting (by numerous requests)
- Corrected the name of the Lightning Rune spell
- Clarified the description of the Novice Destruction Perk to indicate magicka costs of all destruction spells are initially lowered.
- Magic Resistence perks in Alteration were restored to their original values after confirming NPCs use their own leveled spells and are unaffected by this mod.


v1.01
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- By Popular request, I added a seperate .esp that contains only the leveled destruction spells for players using other mods that affect dual casting and magicka regeneration.


v1.00
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Overall improvements to magicka use
- Magicka regen in combat increased to 75% of normal (was 33%)
- Spell costs are now reduced by 40% of your skill in the corresponding school of magic (was 25%)

Improvements to dual casting (it's now a perk worth taking)
- Dual casting effectiveness increased to 3x damage (was 2.2x)
- Dual casting cost reduced to 2.2x magicka (was 2.8x)

Leveled Destruction Spells. All spells improve as you fill your perk tree - Master spells will still be the most powerful, and novice spells will still be the weakest, however, the novice spells will have improved significantly enough to still be useful as low cost damage even against high level opponents.
- All destruction spells have been adjusted to new "base" levels of damage. THIS GREATLY REDUCES THE MAGNITUDE OF HIGH LEVEL SPELLS WITHOUT PERKS!
- All destruction spells now scale in both magnitude and cost with perks for novice, apprentice, adept, expert, and master destruction. Specifically, damage is increased by 50% of the base magnitude with each perk. Cost is adjusted to correspond to half the cost it would have been at the original magnitude then scaled to the current magnitude.

Improvements to Alteration
- Magic Resistence Perks in Alteration have been increased to 15/30/45% to account for stronger destruction magic
- Protection spells like Stoneflesh now provide 25% less armor, but last twice as long (so players don't have to switch equipped spells to recast as often in combat)
- The Novice Alteration Perk now additionally reduces magicka cost so protection spells are close to original cost (even with the decreased armor, the spells were a bit too expensive. Novice spells still get a 50% greater reduction to align it with the perk as intended, and later perks are unchanged.)
- The Mage Armor perks now cause protection spells like Stoneflesh to be 3, 4, and 5 times as strong (this is to balance the weaker armor of the spells themselves. Protection spells become a little less useful for armored players, and a little more useful for unarmored players with the perks.)
- Stability now increases the duration of Alteration spells by 150% (protection spells will last 300 seconds)


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Thank you for checking out my mod! Feel free to leave comments, suggestions, or endorse this mod http://skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=2275.

Sweet. I like the different esp choices for regen, but now youre going to get people wanting you to separate the regen from the dual casting

Were you planning to take a crack at the other schools of magic as well?

Based on the feedback I've received, many people want some of the other schools to scale better as well (conjured weapons and summons to scale appropriately, a more elegant solution for wards, improvements to unarmored... erm... I mean alteration!) I'm not sure how much I will be able to implement before the Creation Kit is released, but figured I may as well start laying the groundwork now.

Awesome!
Love the amount of choices, and the ability to choose

I really enjoyed your readme format.

Thanks! I'm still working on the other schools of magic, so suggestions for improvement are welcome. Also, if you notice any bugs or feel the mod is over- or under-powered, let me know!

Oh wow that does seem kinda imba. Dual-casting & impact is The Way To Go in vanilla, this is going to make stunlocking so much easier. Perhaps you could nerf Impact a little to compensate? I've actually stopped dual-casting on my mage because of it.

Also, how feasible would it be for the Master destruction perk (or any other, really) to reduce damage vs. teammates (or just friends) to 0? It's hard to play as a proper battlemage in epic civil war conflicts, as you just end up aggroing your supporting army when you throw fireballs at people they then run into melee with, and spells like Firestorm and Blizzard become kind of useless.

Those numbers have been toned back in the adept and master variations of the mod. I've been working on trying to find a solution for both of the problems you just mentioned. The spells that can be dual cast call a magic effect for impact (with a conditional check to ensure the perk has been taken), with a magnitude of 0.25 - it seems as though the intention was that opponents would be staggered 25% of the time? Yet... it seems to trigger much more often than that. I'll keep working on it. I also haven't figured out why some spells target companions while others do not, but I am searching for that answer too. Right now, it's a lot of sifting through hex values and guessing what the numbers might do, and then a lot of trial and error testing. I am eagerly awaiting the creation kit, which I hope will make things much easier!

Awesome work!

As an alteration-heavy mage, I do have a small request, a bug you might be able to help fix.

Ebonyflesh overrides Dragonhide. If you have ebonyflesh active (And, now it has an even longer duration...), if you then cast Dragonhide it doesn't take effect because the game classifies them as being the same sort've spell, and erroneously considers dragonhide to be weaker and thus ignores it. Kind've dumb for the master-level defensive spell of the school.

Hey by any chance can you send me your magic balancing that has casting time? I want to apply casting time to a mod I'm working on, but I'm not sure how it is supposed to be done. Can you perhaps give me some direction on how you did it?

The casting delay time is a floating point value stored within the DATA section of the magic effect (MGEF). If you break it up into sets of 4 bytes each, it's the 13th. (Look for values of 40 40 00 00 in the MGEF for master spells - that's the 3 second casting delay they normally have.)

If fact, http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Tes5Mod:Mod_File_Format/MGEF is a link to all of the data I've figured out so far as I've been working on this mod. I've been documenting at UESPwiki in hopes that some other modders might be spared the trouble of trying to decipher what I already did and can focus on filling in the gaps that are still missing.

Mysty

Can you adjust magicka costs so that single handed casting is nearly free, but dual casting costs significant mana?

This will balance Impact as more of an active defense, and make life not so horribly punishing on lower level mages on Expert or Master.

This is equivalent to fighters/archers being able to get off normal swings endlessly but consuming stamina for burst.

It was a mistake for Bethesda to balance mage around cost reduction. As you level you already gain more mana. You don't need cheap spells at high level, you need them at low, when you have a small pool. Every other game in history seems to realize this. I guess they just had an out of the box thinker on staff.

Nice sounds good, I'll wait a bit to get it.

Hmmm... I haven't been able to figure out where the base cost of magic effects is stored. So far, I can change the magnitude/area/duration of individual spells, the multiplier for magicka cost of a group of spells by level (novice/apprentice/etc.), the multiplier for magnitude based on keywords contained in the spell (ie. MagicFireDamage, etc.), and the damage/cost/cast time multipliers for dual casting.

I might be able to pull it off if... the first perk reduced magicka cost of all spells significantly more than it does now (making them super cheap) and increasing the dual casting cost multiplier even more significantly. But that seems... awkward. I'd honestly rather figure out how the heck the perk effect works and reduce the chance to stagger.

Alright, updating now.
Improved destruction made the difference in my gameplay experience. Thanks again.

A poster named Osyris shared this information. You could use this to manually force lower costs on the one-handed spell records, and to make Wards not so self defeating. In fact, I would make Wards ridiculously cheap to maintain, due to their charging mechanic.

Posted 28 November 2011 - 07:56 PM
It's pretty easy to set a spell to a set cost just take a look at the spells SPIT record.

67 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 3F 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 A6 2C 0F 00

Blue is the spell cost stored as an integer in big endian, Red is a flag for manual spell cost (01 for manual, 00 for auto). This spell would have a base cost of 103 magicka.

Oh, excellent. I had not been able to figure out the SPIT record yet, so that is extremely helpful.

Hope you can use the information quickly then. I've not been playing my mage at all, would like to return to it with your help.

This mod looks great. But is there a way to make the altered casting time for master spells optional? I actually like the long preparation for master spells...I think it's appropriate and it hasn't decreased my enjoyment of magic. It just takes a little more planning to use the master spells than other spells. In most RPGs, characters can't just fling out their most powerful invocations on a whim, and I don't think Skyrim should be different...

I play on Adept, which might affect things. But in my experience the damage/effectiveness of the master spells ARE powerful enough to justify the long casting time. My fire storms 1-shot most enemies that are adjacent to my character, Bane of the Undead severely weakens and terifies every undead (even dragon priests) I encounter, and Mass Paralysis paralyzes everything except powerful dragons and undead...

Yes, it affects things. A sleeping horse could randomly kick the keyboard while it dreams of carrots and fancy mares and succeed in combat on Adept.

NOTHING is unbalanced on adept because the player is divinity made flesh, a God among maggots, Master of All He Surveys on Adept.

All magic mods are based on Master difficulty.

Magic is *fine* on adept. It's when the mobs have 5x health and do 5x damage that the system Bethesda implemented breaks down and makes you wonder if there's some producer at Bethesda who sleeps badly at night because he feels unaccomplished.


The master spells all svck hoarfrost on Master mode. They svck so badly that their svck requires a four year college math education to begin to quantify their logarithmic svck. The casting time has a lot to do with that.

CuteUnit, you just made me LOL for real...

Soooo... how's progress? I must beat Skyrim so I can move on to Deus Ex!

For conjuration, I would be interested in higher level versions of the atronach summons. I like my flame atronach and would like it to be viable all the way to endgame. Also, the frost atronach has not long range spells. (Putting this with the fact that it is frost element and it's at a double disadvantage. ) Maybe we could give it some long range spells.

About wards, I have a request. I didn't voice it earlier because I thought it would be very difficult without the CK but, after reading the text from a couple of loading screens, I now think it may be possible. Let me explain:

In vanilla Skyrim, it seems that wards work like this (let's take a 40-points ward as an example):

A) ward needs more or less a second to protect you at full power. Let me call this interval of time "ward set-up time"
B ) ward protects you as long as it doesn't receive more than 40 points of (spell) damage...in a short period of time"]. This means that wards are very bad at protecting you against weak-but-continious spells such as flames or sparks (because, even if they can only deal 16 damage, the fact that it's "damage per second" means that such spells only need 2.5 seconds to deal 40 damage. Therefore, in 2.6 seconds the ward breaks).
C) If wards don't receive damage for a while, they can once again protect you at full power. Let me call this "for a while" "ward regeneration penalty time"

Now I consider this system terrible due to the fact that it doesn't matter if the ward is at full power or agonizing, it will still cost you a ton of magicka to maintain. So, my solution, and also my request:

Set the "ward set-up time" to 0 (so that it can protect you at full power as soon as it's casted)
Set the "ward regeneration penalty time" to 0 (so that a 40-points ward can protect you from spells of 40 damage and below FOREVER -provided of course that you have enough magicka to sustain the ward)

Now I don't knw if these variables exist in game. However, the fact that set up time and regen penalty time are mentioned explicitely in loading screens/by NPCs makes me believe that they exist and, therefore, that they are tweakable.

I should probably endorse this, seeing as I've been using it for awhile.

Great mod. Adding the modularity was a huge plus and I don't feel that this mod is as overpowered as some others. Plus, it makes novice spells somewhat useful. Thanks.