(TL;DR warning - part of the beta process )
http://skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=1992

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PART ONE (relz):

This is the first phase of a complete pacing and leveling revamp.

Two aspects of existing mods and mod-making have bothered me in this category:

A) Not one mod *actually* reduces skill gain in a direct or linear fashion. The ones that claim things like "half skill gain" may be half at, say, SLevel 40, but then would be 1/100th at Slevel 80, because they ALL alter the EXPONENT to the formula, not the denominator.

B ) The main problem in Skyrim isn't the overall skill gain, it's the gain of particular skills relative to others. Alchemy is slow; enchanting is fast. A conjuration mage may very well master his lockpicking long before his conjuration.

I have many other goals, but I'm releasing a quick "idea" version of the mod right now, as I usually do.

This mod will, first, change skill gain overall to *exactly* half of the regular skill gain. This is optional (there are two versions). It won't alter the curve, so no crazy exponential results at higher levels.

Secondly, and more importantly, this mod alters the relative speeds of each skill gain. I've tried to base this off of my own experience, but I've been very busy - on the rare chance that I have spare time, I'm actually more likely to mod!

That means that I need your help with these values. The upside is that these are perk-implemented and in no way require a new character; we can beta test and tweak these values like crazy without screwing up a saved game (but always back up beta testing savegames!).

Here are the values so far:

Alchemy 1.5x
Conj 1.4x
L.Armor 1.3x
Block 1.2x
H.Armor 1.2x
Rest 1.2x
Alteration 1.2x
Dest 1.15x
Speech 1.1x
Archery 1.1x
2Hand 0.95x
1Hand 0.9x
Illusion 0.75x
Lockpick 0.75x
P.Pocket 0.65x
Sneak 0.65x
Ench 0.5x
Smith 0.5x

I know some of you will disagree crazily - let's all sort this out without freaking out, please I *can't* do this modularly until I get a CK and can script (more effectively). But please let me know what you think should be changed (AND *WHY*) - let me know what feels too fast or too slow in your game and by how much. Actual differences in skill values, held relative to playstyle, for mid-level characters, are very handy. (EG, I know that my thief has a sneak of ninety and a one-handed of about 40, even though she would consider them even in importance and use - let's not even talk about her archery... My mage focuses heavily on conjuration but somehow is always gaining in restoration instead. And we all know that smithing and enchanting go WAY too fast while alchemy goes WAY too slow.) I also tried to generally prioritize combat-based skills, since leveling up from noncombat skills leaves you gimped when a level-25 wight nails you with a crazy instakill shout all because you became a good armorsmith. (See below for my further thoughts on this.)

These average out to 0.94x; with tweaking, they should average to even. The mod itself has a global slowdown of 50% - so all skills progress at half rate on top of their relative changes. I will, tomorrow, add modular options for global slowing/speeding. Like I said, this is the first mod I know of where this isn't a change in the exponent curve.

THIS PART HAS BEEN TESTED TO BE COMPATIBLE WITH ELYS' UNCAPPER. Anything else in the same camp, probably not.

READ THIS: To use this, you have to have the Thief, Warrior, Mage, or Lover stones active - no other stones, and no stonelessness...itude. If you really don't have a stone, they're up the path from Riverwood (I typed Rivendell first ) back towards Helgen; the game intended for you to run across them. Pick one up. The lover version slowdown is 60% of normal instead of 50%.

BUG: You won't get the well-rested perk. This bug exists with the Lover Stone in Vanilla, anyway, and it's a dumb perk

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Part Two (relz):

Linear leveling! Ever notice that levels 1-10, or even 1-20, come WAAAY too fast - all those low-level quests go to waste and you're fighting uber-liches when you still feel like you're learning how to shield bash? On the other hand, by the time you're level 40 or so, you might as well be starting a few alts, because you're in for some tedium.

I've reversed this. With linear leveling, every level takes "1100" experience, which is exactly the average amount per level on the way to the level cap. I've included a couple nifty charts in the images at the Nexus. For a rough idea - Vanilla xp to level 2 is 125; mine is 1100. Vanilla level 10 from 9 is 325; mine is 1100. Vanilla level 41 is 1100; even. Vanilla xp for level 81, the "natural" cap (all skills @ 100) is 2100, meaning at levels over 41, with this mod, you'll be leveling quite a bit faster, as much as twice as fast, than you would with Vanilla.

Take account the mod above, though, and you're still spending more time reaching the cap. It's just that their curve feels PUNISHING at the upper levels and PAMPERING at the lower levels... to me. Linear gives it that epic NWN feel (not that NWN is more epic than TES, but the levels feel equally epic to one another).

This is optional, included, and probably not the most awesome idea for a long-standing character (new character recommended). If you must use an existing character, open up the console (~ key) and go:
player.setlevel X
player.advlevel 1
player.updatelevel

Where X is your current level minus one (go back a level, up a level, and then "update," which iteself might not even do anything, but, hey, it's an idear.) Then, if this works like FO3/FNV, the game may punish you severely, keeping track of all the experience you haven't got, and expecting you to catch up before you get to level again. Teehee.

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Part Three (WIP):

Training Fix. I want to have unlimited training, but 5x the cost; found the latter setting, but not yet the former. Haven't looked too hard, yet, though.

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Part Four (WIP):

PERKS. First, there needs to be more perks per level (3?), more perks that scale, and many of the mid-level perks need to come down some (in level reqs) so that you don't have to be Thor The SuperDuperAlmighty to start specializing. The first part of that is driving me crazy, but won't be a problem once I get a script.

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Other parts... I had a whole list of ideas based on things that svcked about Skyrim's pacing, but I'm pooping out. I always do this crap late at night, which is why I ramble forever in my readmes/posts and probably left a digit out of a mod that'll make it crash, and I'll wake up and facepalm my face. Headbutt my palm. It's all relative.

Amazing work, as ever Xodarap. Looking forward to seeing what you come up with when the CK is actually released

A lot of interesting ideas from you, as usual...

A few thoughts from me:
Skill gain:
Skill gain seems to depend a lot on circumstances.
E.g. I'm playing an sneaking archer and don't think that stealth is too fast or bows are too slow (both are around 70 at level 25 for me).
It might be, though, that stealth levels too fast for people that prefer using daggers, maybe because you get closer to the enemies, or simply because you move more in comparison to a more stationary archer.
Btw., I didn't find lockpicking too fast, either.
Crafting skills in particular may profit more from introducing some restrictions like diminishing exp from repeatedly crafting the same item or from crafting low level items at high skill levels (so you can't level to 100 with iron daggers).

Perks:
Most early perks are a bit boring - increase damage, reduce mana cost, etc.
Depending on what is possible it might be nice to have some more variance there.

Taking this seriously


STRONGLY agreed. Next step. Hard to figure out exactly what to do. I had so many awesome ideas in FO3/FNV. They'll come as I play more, I'm sure...

These two values I disagree with. Illusion seems rather easy to level, because muffle can be cast outside of combat for experience. Alteration on the other hand requires you to cast the armor spells in combat to level, so at least a mage character is rather restricted by his magicka in leveling this (of course, you can just exploit the game by chain casting while standing in a lake with enemies around, but I don't consider that "normal" gameplay). If armor spells granted experience outside of combat, then alteration leveling should of course be reduced (even further).

Changing smithing and enchanting leveling speed? Especially enchanting. It's not as if the later wasn't tedious enough to do due to the big number of manipulations required in the interface.

And what would slowing it down accomplish? Can you level smithing "naturally" in the game? Once you made one armor set, you are done. There's no need to make more and more elven armors cause you already got one so the only way to level those skills is to craft more and more items you don't need to sell them. IE, the only way to level those skills is to purposely go out of your way to grind the skill up.

If you said you were changing it so that you need high level crafts to level the skills, OK it might work but plain slowing them just adds tedium and little else.

As for changing the XP to level up, I think you are doing it wrong too. The issues are many, first is that you counted the XP to level cap and put it all linearly to that. But the 81 level cap is insane! That's NOT something you should plan to reach. The "level soft cap" is at around 45. Let's say 50. Anything above is extra grind that has little use for the player. You change makes it THAT much harder to reach level 50 naturally.

Also, you said you wanted levels to go linearly but putting each level at 1100 XP for level up fails miserably because low level skills give little XP compared to high level skills.

So what you did is make leveling ultra slow at start and faster later, and you force players to grind 12 skills to 100 to unlock the level 50 content thus greatly unbalancing the number of perks you get compared to the skills you trained.

I'd say, make it so that total XP needed to reach 50 is the same in your mod than in Vanilla.

- Can you make Pickpocketing go even slower than 0.75x, like 0.4x or even 0.3x? Right now it's fairly easy to get it up close to 100 just by pickpocketing from a lot of people in only 2 towns (for us kleptomaniacs).

- Can you include future changes like to perks, etc. in separate ESP files so we can mix-and-match to our pleasure? In fact it'd probably be best if you put the changes to how fast you level each skill and the changes to the leveling *curve* as separate ESPs (include both merged and separate)

Great mod

In principle I agree with this, but I have grown tired of all the people complaining about "broken" smithing because they can't refrain themselves from crafting iron daggers until they are at level 100.

I think the skill is balanced around using it only as much as it is needed to provide you with some gear and upgrade it, not for larping a blacksmith. However, a lot of people are unhappy with this sort of balancing, therefore it might make sense to implement some sort of re-balancing.
IMHO, the goal shouldn't be that you have to craft 100 complete suits of daedric armor just to reach lvl 50 in the skill, but rather to discourage "exploitive" behavior like binge-crafting iron daggers al the way to 100.


He might have a point there, basically at low levels you will need a lot of skill increases to reach the next level (if I understood the system right), meaning that it also may have far-reaching implications for the game balance: Wouldn't that mean that the game gets much more easy because you are much stronger compared to vanilla while enemies stay weak (those that are leveled that is)?

This is a good point. My adjusted values came from as-naturally-as-possible playing a mage up to level 22. I never cast muffle because he wasn't sneaky, and because of the level restrictions (eg, spell would say "enemies up to level 8" when my mage was level 15), I had rare opportunities to use illusion well. On the other hand, his alteration was out of control, but that was because I started any given fight by dual-casting stoneflesh and flame atro (and conj just never seemed to budge).

Also, alteration doesn't have to be *cast* in combat, technically: if you put up a stoneflesh shield, then 30 seconds later, someone attacks you, and it's still up, it will get counted.

But this is why I was polling the community These values will be changed.


What you mean by "naturally" is pretty subjective, here. You also have to "grind" one-handed. Yes, you may be more likely to accomplish that in the framework of questing, but many would consider an hour spent crafting iron daggers no different than an hour spent swinging them. In that context, smithing is WAY too fast. And that's the context I've seen it in on the boards. Regarding tedium, that's also equally subjective. How is a complex task like smithing MORE tedious than clicking a mouse over and over again at my crosshairs? Oh, I see what you mean, you personally prefer a certain playstyle and want your skill growth to be time-consumption imbalanced to cater to that


Have you gotten an idea of the material available in this game - not even counting the INFINITE radiant quest system? (Note: ratio of infinity to "insane" = infinity) In some games that I've tried to balance, I've meticulously planned out compensations for casual players and hardcoe players -- but Skyrim is so casual, it's ridiculous. On Master, I fall asleep fighting a dragon and a bunny will kill it for me. Quests just happen TO me. So, yes, I made the mods for the hardcoe nutjobs first. The casual players are perfectly catered to *already* in the game. However, your point stands as do ALL those who disagree with me, and you'll see a response mod up soon. Just don't be a dike about it, like...

Oh, the internet tendency to belligerently cry fail before thinking... and to add hyperbolic modifiers like "miserably." It just makes me want to pettily point out that you're mathematically challenged. Do you know WHY lower level skills add less experience? Because they take less time. If we're talking about linearity of leveling, we're quantifying over TIME spent. Roughly, the skills required to level are time-compensated. That means that if my mod requires 25 low skill-levels for level 2, but 5 high-level skills for level 30, those high-level skills took five times as much TIME to accomplish (5*5=25, btw), thereby evening out the time spent, which seems... oddly LINEAR to me. Say it takes 10k swings of your sword to go from level 2 to 3; it should take about that many to go from level 10 to 11.

It's not perfect, no. The exponent curve modifier is 1.95, but if you look at my second graph, it looks suspiciously like 1/(x^2) - ie, the inverse of a square (~ x^1.95, the level curve). Back to the math you don't get: (1/x^1.95)*(x^1.95) = 1. x = 1 is normally considered "fairly linear."

Don't throw "fail"s around at my efforts. Next time, try this: "Hey, in my playstyle, shooting for level 50 makes a lot more sense - would you mind making a mod that crosses vanilla at level 50 instead?" No problem


I always modularize as much as possible. Currently, due to the lack of creating new scripts (or rather, compiling them), I'm stuck throwing all of those skills as modifiers into the skill modifiers on the stones. In fact, I had to rewrite the stones from scratch, but they're an easy place to find an easily-added perk. So I can't separate them out.

As far as the level linearity goes, that one is separated out - you can combine or not to your heart's content

Oh yeah, and you're right on pickpocketing. As can already be seen, I'm trying to balance two considerations: the "natural" leveling speed of a skill as you go about the game (eg quests), and the compulsion many have to grind out overly-grindable skills.

I may make a grinder version and a quester version.

I'd agree with making skills level slower. Not put too much though into how much, but yes I agree that it shouldn't be as fast as it is in the vanilla game.

I like it, it's good.

While you're checking this, I believe the first data set of the SPIT section has something to do with the base cost of spells, and some type of multiplier in the second set of data in the MGEF. Not entirely sure, but I'm thinking it might be. Sort've off topic, but figured it might be relevant to you.

Speaking only for myself, I actually want to smith daggers without having to worry about my Smithing increasing. I've found one of the most lucrative ways to make money is to smith iron daggers and enchant them with petty gems. With the right enchantment, this is more lucrative than saving all my Iron Ore for transmutation to Gold. Doing this, however, has pretty much gimped my character as he is now much higher level than his combat skills would suggest.

Making smithing and enchanting experience gain progressive solves two problems for me, and it has nothing to do with self control.

My current working reworking of the skills:


Alchemy 1.5
Conj 1.4
L.Armor 1.3
Block 1.2
H.Armor 1.2
Rest 1.2
Alteration 1.2
Dest 1.15
Speech 1.1
Archery 1.1
2Hand 0.95
1Hand 0.9
Illusion 0.75
Lockpick 0.75
P.Pocket 0.65
Sneak 0.65
Ench 0.5
Smith 0.5

This.

After doing a dungeon or two, I use all the leather I've found to make a bunch of leather helmets, improve them, and then sell them. I get about a level of smithing for it. It feels very natural. I suppose I could buy up all the leather and power-level, but... then I'm power-leveling, so isn't that what I want? Isn't that what I'm actively trying to do?

Bottom line is that smithing is only "broken" if you're trying to break it.

Half-true. It's not "broken," but it does level more quickly than other skills. Naturally, if you're considering it a skill to be worked on at all, you will probably throw in some ingots and maybe buy the mats for a suit or two while you're at it - not necessarily powerleveling (which certainly wouldn't be changed by this mod - you'd just have to PL twice as much ), but really, in my experience, it'll still level a bit faster than other skills. There's also the bigger issue that even if it is leveling at the same rate as other levels, it'll gimp your combat level.

The solution to this is two-tier:
First, skill gain in smithing should be relative to the tier of components (eg, daedric daggers improve skill more than iron daggers, which wouldn't do squat to your skill at higher levels). Second, smithing shouldn't affect your overall level.

When I have access to (ingame, extended, quest-tied) scripts, expect this

Was I trying to make a massive quantity of Iron Daggers? Yes. Was I also enchanting that massive quantity of Iron Daggers with simple enchants? Yes. Was I doing it so that I could level my smithing and enchanting abhorrently fast? No. Was I doing it so that I could make enough money to buy a fricking house in Whiterun? Yes!

Some people aren't trying to abuse the system for xp, some people are using the materials they have in the most effective manner to make money in the most effective way they can. Just like people do in real life. I didn't want to have 100 smithing by level 20. I just wanted money so I could have a house to store stuff and relax and use as my character's home, because roleplaying his place of residence made sense. Him valuing that residence because of all the hard work he had to do in order to earn it made sense. Him travelling to different towns to sell his wares made sense. Him being a master blacksmith and enchanter by only forging magical iron daggers, did not make sense...

EDIT: OP I like the way what you're doing looks mechanically. When I get the chance to I would love to help you by helping to test the skill leveling, unfortunately I'm using a friend's computer so I'm not really using mods yet =[

Do you plan on having a full feature customizer mod like you did in the past?

For controlling, level speed, global dmg, item rarity,etc? Also it sounds like you have figure out how to add perks to the game with out the CK, is this true?

I think a key aspect of perk overhaul is to make sure all the perks are useful regardless of level(and adding a lot more).

Excellent stuff! Very much enjoyed your Fallout overhaul, very keen to try this one. I especially think that the linear leveling is a fantastic idea, look forward to seeing how it works in practice.

I agree about slowing down sneak, however I'd suggest that in this case maybe the exponent of skill gain could be what needs increasing. Because you can start to sneak past more and more people, get closer to everyone to backstab etc, it levels up very fast at higher levels - and so can go from e.g. 60 to 100 very quickly (and at 100 it's so powerful it almost feels like cheating, but that's a separate issue). I would love to see it become much harder to get to 100 without making the barrier to entry too high at the lower levels when you can be seen/heard from miles off.

Regarding smithing...I'm not sure it's the rate of skill gain that's the problem, I think it's more just that grinding so clearly feels like the "best" way of increasing it. Reposting something I wrote elsewhere, which I think might be relevant (some of these suggestions are clearly beyond what can be done without the CS, and may be outside the scope of what you want to do anyway). The tl;dr version is that I agree that the rate of increase from crafting needs decreasing, but that the rate of increase from improving could do with increasing (relatively), and xp perhaps ought to come from tanning and smelting as well.

Thank you so much! As an artisan character who in addition to combat skills was constantly leveling up crafting skills, not because I was trying to level up but just because I enjoyed crafting, I really appreciate this!

What exactly is the issue with the guardian stones? You have to keep one of those four stones throughout your game? Or do you just have to have one of them when you activate this mod? I can't give my Lord Stone up permanently. Must have the magic resistance.

I wish Beth would switch to at least hybrid xp system. There are so many problems with just gaining levels via skill gains. Instead like Oblivion Xp, have quest, monster kills,etc give you xp. And at level up you can raise skills as needed. And you could still keep the skill raising by doing just reduce the impact it has on xp by 75% or so.

Skyrim already has the foudations for a xp system in place, I would think it would be much easier to do than Oblivion xp. I assume there is a console command that you can use to add xp, so you would need to attach a script to quests,etc to gain xp. And you would have to script a way to raise skills in the level up screen. Hmmm, I should contact the OB Xp author about this.

Lotta big changes -- check out the new readme section for details:

INSTALLATION and Description of files

Files have been broken down into two groups:

Group 1:
* Skill rebalance is a rebalance of each skill to RELATIVE speeds as mentioned below; speed changes are overall changes to how fast you gain skills.
* For example: "1 - Skill Rebalance + 50% Speed" will readjust skills to the differences below AND further reduce all skill gain to half the normal rate; "1 - NO Rebalance - 150% Speed" will NOT rebalance the skills relative to each other, but will INCREASE skill gain speed by 1.5 times.
* The relative skill balances, which average out to 1x, are currently:
Alchemy 1.5x
Conj 1.4x
L.Armor 1.3x
Block 1.2x
H.Armor 1.2x
Rest 1.2x
Alteration 1.2x
Dest 1.15x
Speech 1.1x
Archery 1.1x
2Hand 0.95x
1Hand 0.9x
Illusion 0.75x
Lockpick 0.75x
P.Pocket 0.65x
Sneak 0.65x
Ench 0.5x
Smith 0.5x
* And still being tweaked. Weigh in on them at the forums, please.

Group 2:
*This group changes the rate at which you LEVEL (not gain skill - though it will change how many skills it takes to level.) Please see the included Level Curves.jpg for a graphical representation. This is to make up for Skyrim's obnoxiously fast early levels, and punishingly slow late levels.
* "Linear" makes leveling totally linear, while "Less Linear" is a compromise between Skyrim's harsh vanilla curve and the shocking difference of a straight line.
* The significance of X50's: in the Vanilla game (unmodded), raising all skills to 100 will result in a level of 81, but leveling more "practically" maxes out around level 50 - so while my original linear leveling targeted the max level for "crossing" the vanilla curve (or meeting it) - the X50 versions will cross at level 50 with vanilla. It should be mentioned that this raises the level you would reach by raising ALL skills to 100 (Linear X 50 can reach level 127; Less Linear X 50 can reach level 92).
* I hate that I have to address this, but it's been a concern in forums. Linear IS LINEAR. That is, YES, it will take far more skill gains in the early game to raise a level than it would in the late game - BUT those early skill games come relatively more quickly, to an equal degree. (Say that you're level 2 and do nothing but 1-handed, swinging 10,000 times with your sword and gaining 20 skill-levels in 1H, finally reaching level 3, which took 20 skillpoints. At level 40, you also do 10k swings, gaining only 3 skill-levels in 1H, and reach level 41, which only required 3 skillpoints, but the same 10k swings. THAT'S linear: we're quantifying over time.)
* If you choose to use an active character (new character recommended) for this mod, when you first load it up, go into the console (~ key) and, one line at a time, put in:
player.setlevel X (where X is your current level minus one)
player.advlevel 1
player.updatelevel
You're just leveling down and back up and forcing the game to recheck everything.

*** You can only choose ONE from each group, and you don't need both (you can pick one from either or one from each). More is coming, I promise.

*** These REQUIRE that you have a Lover, Thief, Mage, or Warrior stone active. Other stones are not compatible (yet). If there is sufficient interest, I'll include a console version (requiring player.addperk X in the console, but not touching the stones).

*** Group 1 is tested to be compatible with Elys' Uncapper. Group 2 should be. Both are compatible with perk mods, as long as those perk mods don't touch stones (which are perks in the game engine). I will be releasing my own perk mods, as well as a mod to make Elys' Uncapper actually work with all the skills.

Below is the original readme, with more detail and thought, and stuff. And things.

You would think so, huh? But nope There are no such console commands, nor is there even a command to find a float (sure, it's a float, but always X.000) or percentage or anything like that. Obviously, the HUD is getting the info passed from somewhere, but it isn't a script or console function or accessible AV. GetXPForNextLevel is leftover from Fallout, but doesn't return anything. :/

without using any leveling mods, I'm lvl 42 and I am a light armor wearing 2 handed warrior character that uses Restoration heavily for heals. My 2 hand and light armor values are at 89 each which i guess is mayyybe OK considering I'm not close tor really being done with the game (but then at what point should your character feel complete, certainly not at the very last 10 minutes of the game). So maybe they level too slow considering how much combat I've been in. Restoration? For as much as I've used it, i think it's nuts its only actually at 57 right now.

Yes. And I agree.

After enjoying hex editing of OB, FO3, and FNV, I have to say that I really hate a lot of what they've done to the engine in Skyrim. Though the end result is a huge step forward (SOOO much closer to balanced than their previously attrocious-in-this-category games!), the tangle under the hood looks like a huge step backward. If they would have at least kept the script group, I could compile from TESSnip, which I preferred over the GECK anyway

CK will change things. I will do a modular overhaul, depending on interest generated by the intermediate steps.

This is a good point. I think I hated sneak's leveling because my sneaky char maxed it out while my other skills were squat. Then everything was so high-level relative to my combat skills that I *HAD* to throat-slit everyone. Or die in a hit.
I do think it's that simple


Gotta keep 'em active. I'll release a version of this that's not the case... tomorrow, probably. It's just more copying and pasting...