EDIT: Mr Furious has very kindly made this mod for me! And it is currently in 0.1 stage. Download it at: http://tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=29910.

Hi.

I'm currently building my 100% perfect, CTD free Oblivion, and I'm very close to being there. I focused quite a lot on the RP element and the choices you are given, but there is just one little thing that still aggravates me. The spell effectiveness system has a lot of potential, and I want a mod to change that. After a fair bit of searching none of the stuff I did really satisfied what I wanted.

For example, using Supreme Magicka wearing a Leather Cuirass had the same effect as a Daedric Cuirass - both dropped my spell effectiveness to 60%. This seems stupid to me; to me leather armour would have far less of an effect on my spell effectiveness than Daedric would. So I am asking, is there a mod which does this? Makes heavy armour have a far more detrimental effect to spell effectiveness than light?

Perhaps also levels of armour makes a difference, for example Glass armour reduces spell effectiveness more than Fur armour, though both are types of light armour. Seems to make sense for me and spices up the game a bit! Now perhaps I have a reason not simply to pop on the next Glass cuirass I find, as I do enjoy my magic. Plus it also makes light armour way more useful vs heavy armour for the major skill selections.

Thanks in advance, my searches yielded no results!

Another idea/request: could heavy armour perhaps impose stricter movement/agility penalties? I'm pretty sure there is a mod that does this but is there one that does both my spell effectiveness idea AND this?

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=20037

Maybe that will save the day for you.

Hmm....that's not quite what I wanted. I think spell effectiveness being damaged more by heavier armour is a great idea, and if there is no mod like this, I may even attempt to make one myself! Though I have no idea about modding.

Noone knows of a mod like this? That's depressing as I have no idea how to mod it .

Literally all I want is so that wearing a full suit of heavy armour gives 30% spell effectiveness, whilst a full light gives 65%. Or values to that effect. Something which gives light more of an advantage over heavy.

Hmm, I used to know the formula for this, which would help you find the values you need. Uhm. Try doing a search for posts by ianpatt for effectiveness; he's the one that explained it to me. It should be on the Wiki somewhere, but I strongly suspect it isn't.

No cigar, darn. I know the values for editing spell effectiveness generically for all armour, but what would really be fantastic is if I could change it independantly for light and heavy armour! Thanks for the help anyway, I will continue to hunt!

If you tell me which settings are used in the vanilla game, I'll make this for you. I will have to use OBSE, though.

Oh wow, that's great!

The 2 values (I think) are:

SetGS fMagicArmorPenaltyMax
setGS fMagicArmorPenaltyMin

Where penalty max is the most amount the game will ever be able to reduce you to, and min is the minimum amount (in %) the game will reduce your effectiveness per piece of armour. I like to use 0.7 for maximum and 0.15 for minimum. This means each piece of armour I add reduces the effectiveness by 15%, and the lowest it can ever get will be 30%.

Hope that helps, thanks if you do make ths mod!

That's... not actually what it means. It means that if you add one piece of armor (no matter how good you are in that type of armor), you will never have better than 85% spell effectiveness while wearing armor. You also will never have worse than 30% effectiveness, no matter how much armor you wear and how little skill you have in it.

However, you could use those settings, if you were to calculate what the Spell Effectiveness should be, and then set both of those values to the desired value.

Alternatively, use Get/SetCastEfficiency, to ignore all that and just set it yourself.

Haha oops. You see this is the problem, I can't create the mod if I don't actually know what the values mean or how to use the CS. Bugger.

Unfortunately, the post where ianpatt posted how Spell Effectiveness is normally calculated got pruned (drr... I think they're doing that faster these days than they used to), and I don't actually have the formula available. You might PM ianpatt about it, I suppose.

I have the script ready, but I'll make a configurable ini file before I upload it.

Right now each different piece of armor has a different efficiency penalty, and the Heavy Armor penalties are twice as high as the Light Armor penalties. I probably will update it to include skill levels, and expand it to include other factors.

It is compatible with anything that changes the script modifier for spell efficiency, but not with anything that changes the related game settings, as these are set to 0.

The actual way it works is to have each slot get a "weight" (so like, 15% of your effectiveness comes from your lack of boots or gauntlets, while the cuirass costs 30%, etc), and then interpolate between Min and Max using the relevant skill out of a 100. So like...

(WeightPct/100)*(((Max-Min)/100*Skill)+Min)

for each piece of armor. I don't remember which settings those weights were, though... or maybe they were just hard-coded, I don't honestly remember. Anyway, you take that value and subtract it from the max, I think... no that's wrong. Uhm. I dunno. The idea is if you have 100 in the skill, you should be at the maximum spell effectiveness, even fully armored. Each piece should lower your effectivness somewhat (assuming your skill isn't 100), and if you have 0 skill and are fully armored you should be at the Min.

I have uploaded a first version here: http://tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=29910

I'll have a look in the vanilla behavior when I have some time.

Man, thanks a lot for making this! This really makes the game that much better! I will test it immediately.

If you ARE planning on future additions, perhaps overall magic skill affects magic effectiveness as well, as well as armour skills?

Perhaps magic skill can be calculated by adding together all 6 magic skills (Conjuration, Destruction, etc), and then this value can have an effect on Spell effectiveness (only when wearing armour). So for example with a magic skill of 30 (5 X 6 as a novice in all magic skills), and wearing full heavy armour my spell effectiveness might only be 20%. But wearing the same full heavy armour with a magic skill of 600 (10 X 6 as a master of all magic skills) will give me 70% or something. This could also be coupled with the armour skills so that if you are a master of that armour and a master of all 6 magic schools you can have an effectiveness of 90%. Just a thought.

Once again, thank you for making this. Much appreciated as I have NO modding talents whatsoever.

EDIT: I like this mod very much! It works exactly how I'd hoped, and is fantastic. Thanks a lot! However, I have perhaps another suggestion for the next version, if such a thing will exist. Perhaps take into account the relative weight of the armour? For example, wearing a glass cuirass should be different to wearing a leather cuirass. The glass weighs 15, whilst the leather weighs 7, therefore under my reasoning, leather should have 1/2 the damage on your spell effectiveness, if that makes sense? The same for heavy armour?

Everything is possible...
Well, almost everything, but the things you mentioned certainly are possible. The main problem for me is balancing, as I haven?t played the game for quite a while. But that?s why I?ve included an .ini file.

And with 30 downloads in less than a day, it seems like you?re not the only one who wants this mod, so I will likely update it.

vanilla behavior gives max effectiveness at 50 skill, that value is hardcoded IIRC.

The weighting for effectiveness is based on coverage so it uses iArmorDamageXXChance where XX is the armor slot.