This was previously posted on the USKP thread but went unobserved probably because it was a very long post for a relatively minor issue. I believe however that the information contained below might be useful to the community, so this is getting posted in it’s own thread.

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After some delving in the ck for my personal mod (that among many other things adds a personalized way of having the spells scale based on skill level via the use of perks and keywords, and changes how many spells work on a fundamental elvel) I have come to the conclusion that the fixes seen in tons of mods, including this fantastic one (thanks guys, you are doing the community an incredible service!!!) re. displaying the correct damage for the cloak and wall spells and making it scale with the augment perks are probably not working as intended.

I’m sorry if I may not be very clear in the following, English is my second language, please bear with me.

This is because of different reasons.

For cloaks:

As far as I know, cloak spells work the following way:
i) the actual cloak spell (let’s call it A) available to the player to learn and cast ingame casts the cloak magic effect [B] on self (ie on the player)
ii) the cloak magic effect [B] points under the assoc. item tab to a spell [C] that is internal to the ck and the player can’t see/acquire/cast ingame.
iii) this ‘internal’ spell [C] is the one that actually defines the damage (in case of the vanilla spells, but if custom made could be doing pretty much anything) done to the npc’s that come into contact with the cloak, as per it’s own magic effect [D]

The crucial point here is that, from reading in other threads here on the forum and from personal testing the following is true:
- the actual spell available to the player [A] displays the description written in it’s effect [B]
- the magnitude of [B] determines the area around the player that is affected by [C]
- the damage done by [C] is determined by the magnitude of [D]
- the magnitude of [B] in no way affects the magnitude of [D]
- in the end the damage done by the cloak spell [A] is determined by the magnitude of [D]

All the fixes I’ve seen actually centre on changing the description of [B], substituting with the number written by bethesda ( 8 ) with the “mag” tag ; except this, as shown above, then doesn’t correctly display the damage done by the spell, but the area around the player that the enemies have to be within to receive damage. And there is no way as far as I know to reference in the description of [B] the magnitude of the effect [D]. [or even to display this info directly in the description of the spell [A] itself using the override and writing in it’s apposite description box, which replaces automatically the description of the magic effects that otherwise would be displayed].

Regarding the scaling, again adding the keyword MagicDamageFire (for example) used by the augment perks to the effect [B] actually has the consequence of having the perk increase the area instead of the damage. Adding the keyword to the effect [D] would actually increase the damage, except I don’t know and haven’t found a way to test if this actually works.

For wall spells:

These AFAIK work the following way (this was a pain to discover):
i) the wall spell [A] has an effect [B] that is essentially the same as the one of the novice concentration spell. IE it does –minimal- damage on contact against npcs, as defined by it’s magnitude.
ii) the ACTUAL damage done by the ‘wall’ that is created by casting the spell on a surface is determined by the magnitude of the effect [C] of another spell [D], cast by a hazard (E), that is generated upon contact of the projectile of the effect [B] in point i) with a surface, as determined by it’s impact data (F).

IE when the spray from the wall spell hits something, the game engine checks the impact data set/impact data (F) specified in the magic effect [B] to see what it should do. Generally if it’s a surface in this specific case it spawns a hazard (E) that casts the spell [D] to npc’s that come into contact with it, having effect [C] – which in the case of vanilla wall spells is fire/frost/shock damage, but could be changed in mods to be pretty much anything.

So, by changing the description of effect [B] from the number “50” to “mag” , again we are not displaying what we really want, ie the damage done per sec by the ‘wall’, but instead the minimal damage done by the spray of the wall spell when it impacts directly against an enemy instead of a surface.

Regarding the scaling, for wall spells the situation is even worse than for the cloak spells: again adding the keyword MagicDamageFire (for example) used by the augment perks to the effect [B] just multiplies the minimal secondary damage, not the one done by the hazard. Adding the keyword to the effect [C] would actually increase the damage, except again I don’t know and haven’t found a way to test if this actually works. Also, in this case for the fire wall spell, the hazard referenced is also used in some ‘catapult’ whatever impact set. For the shock wall, the hazard is used by the potema quest for the barrier. And I shudder at the thought of having to redo from scratch by hand the impact data entries just for the wall spells to point to new hazards that scale correctly, this would take AGES, and be very error prone.

If you managed to make it to the end, thank you for reading. I wanted to contribute in my small way to the great work you guys are doing. Hopefully I am wrong and things are much simpler than what I wrote, otherwise I hope you guys will be able to use this info if possible to fix things.