SKILLS


CRAFTING REBALANCE

Crafting an iron dagger 1000 times to become a master blacksmith is rather unrealistic (and gamebreaking). So is raising enchanting to 100 with the same petty soulgems and alchemy with potions from the most common materials and so on. In order to change that the modder should play the game extensively and perhaps make some "tiers" that will allow you to progress in the skill by crafting more powerful things.

For example for blacksmithing: Iron/Steel tier, Dwarven/Orcish tier and so on.
Also the modder should have in mind that the game must offer the player plenty of raw materials in order for this to happen (like dwemer dungeons having metal parts all over the place).

An enchanter for example should bleed to make destruction costs near to 0, or stacking powerful buffs to make his swords hit like a truck. This will make crafting skills a lot more fun and balanced.

MISC SKILLS REBALANCE

Lockpicking is useless. Anyone who has played the game enough will agree on this. Make, for the love of god, apprentice locks impossible for novice, adept impossible for apprentice, expert impossible for adept and master impossible for expert. If i need no more than 5-10 lockpicks to open a master lock at novice levels (which gives me a ton of exp too, then what is the point of the skill). In order for people to be worth raising lockpicking though scale loot depending on the lock difficulty only.

Pickpocketing levels incredibly fast and easily (and yes even if you don't load the game after the catch you). It might need some tuning down.


ITEMS/LOOT


Having completed most of the game's content with 5 characters i found myself predicting the contents of every chest because it depended on my level. Looting becomes tedious. (Enemy looting also scales to a point though it is not so dire from my experience).

If one is to rebalance crafting skills, he must rebalance loot as well. For example you can't be looting dwemer/elven armor when you hit 30 or glass when you hit 40 all the time.

Someone might think of something better but here's my 2 cents:
- Tune down loot so that it stays trashy like when you are level 10.
- Have some very rare chests with static loot and good items.
- Have some static enemies guarding static good loot.
- (optional) Keep 1/100 chests scaled while tuning the rest down to make looting more exciting.

MERCHANTS

As you understand merchants can't scale their inventories especially when all of the above are applied. Atm everything is scaled, so if you go to a dungeon you find the same quality of items the merchants sell you and so on. It also makes most crafting skills obsolete (except if you "powerlevel" them which svcks) not to mention that it is unrealistic.

My 2 cents on this are:
- Have merchants have the same crappy inventory/loot from when you were level 10, with higher quality/echanted items appearing VERY rarely in their inventories and not depending on your level. Have a quality cap in what merchants sell.
- (optional) Keep misc/ingredients category somewhat scaled so that players can find materials to craft etc

Thanks in advance

Looting's easy. Change the game settings to a very, very small fraction of the player level and zone level for the minimum level of loot. Change special loot weighting to 1%, instead of 4%, and open up the range. Loot's thus rare and powerful when you find it. Merchants involves editing the vendor lists and modifying high level entries to link to a second leveled list that has an extremely high chance of not appearing. It's possible that if I have time I'll do something like this over the next week.

Sounds good!

Exactly, loot is easy and imo it's tedious too. I can almost guess what a chest will have in it since they are sorted by quality and just get a random enchantment. No excitement in what you will find, even in each dungeon's last chest or master locked chest. Even if the enchantments are generated randomly the quality is standard and depends on your level. Both with my warrior and my mage i stopped looting long time ago.

Also being so easy to raise crafting skills and looting defeated the purpose of me looting entirely. Crafting skill "tiers" would also fit well with this change.


Edit: After seeing your WIP thread i believe you have some very good ideas.

Personally though my opinion about level scaling is different.
What if you removed the scaling from some enemies and instead increase it with numbers (like the scaling was aprox done in BG1) or in other occasions made them static and more powerful.

I personally found enemy scaling tedious too and easy even (on master dif). Since dungeons were scaled there was nothing to be expected and sense of danger was not really there. Also on the other hand "upgraded" godlike bandits did spoil my immersion too. I'm all for challenge but imo some things such as dragons (except perhaps the main quest ones) should be quite more powerful with a tuned down scaling and enemies such as bandits or novice random mages should not suddenly become godlike.

Dragons, well, if Xoda finishes his epic dragons mod, I'll be able to do more with that.

With regards to loot - doing nearly the opposite of what my mod does. I can open up the entirety of the loot range to say - anywhere from .01x the player level to 3x the player level (so you could theoretically find glass armor when you're only level 10). I can also set a weighting, ie, any special item will have only a 1% chance to drop, or less, even. The merchants takes a bit more work, but it's not too difficult to change a couple items and have merchants have a 2% chance of having an unleveled item pulled randomly. Of course it would cost, but merchants may have one or two rare items on hand. Then the rest could be left as <10 level items.

With scaling, I wanted to go in the direction of - the higher your level, the more enemies you might face. So it'd provide challenge in a slightly different manner. It's difficult to do properly, because while I could entirely remove levels from the calculations, that could also mean the first area you go to has say - frost trolls intended for a level 45 character. Or you could have giant frostbite spiders walking around the woods right outside riverwood, as you just hit level 3. It'd all be random, but it poses complications. What'd be ideal is setting a radius multiplier, the farther out from cities, a multiplier is used on a standard variable to increase the chances of high leveled enemies as you get farther away. But, this is mostly stuff that will tag along with the CK. I'm a bit limited in hexadecimal, at least, with what I know so far of it.