Until the Creation Kit is out, I'll have trouble making any large changes myself, so instead I'd like to request a very simple change from anyone who can make mods using... whatever programs are capable of compiling proper ESP files for this game.

I'd like a mod that gives a 15% increase to all of the spell school mastery perks. For Alteration and Conjuration, each mastery perk would not only halve the cost of spells of a certain rank, but also increase the duration of all spells of that entire school by 15%. For Destruction, Illusion, and Restoration, each perk would increase the magnitude of all spells of that school by 15%. Because these are separate perks and not ranks, they'd multiply each others' effects. Normally, with two ranks of an augment element, a destruction user can only achieve x1.5 damage. With this change, he could get 1.5 * (1.15 * 1.15 * 1.15 * 1.15 * 1.15), which is approximately tripled damage (the actual value is 3.01703578125). This would greatly help to mitigate how poorly Destruction spells scale. By doing it in all schools, you'd help all spell schools scale better, especially helping to make lower levels spells still useful later on.


I'm requesting this because I've seen so many mods similar to it, but none were quite what I wanted. http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=1245 is what I'm using currently because it's extremely close, but it doesn't assign an equal multiplier for each perk and it only affects Destruction. If someone could take the time to edit the descriptions and effects for these perks, I'd really appreciate it.

Have you looked at Balanced Magic yet?
http://skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=2275

Destruction damage, for instance, scales up by 50% with each perk, so that by the time you reach mastery, you are doing 3.5x the damage of your novice level spells. There's a lot more (see the full description) and I'm still working on it - other schools of magic will be coming eventually.

I actually used your mod for some time, but I think it goes a little too far. I'd really prefer not changing the game quite that dramatically. The change I'm asking for is much simpler, plus it's more compatible with other mods due to only changing the mastery perks. Even such a simple change is still effective though: due to multiplication it ends up approximately doubling the duration/magnitude of all spells (2.0113571875 is pretty close to double) once you've got every mastery perk.

If you ever considered a "light" version of Balanced Magic that did something like what I'm asking (or exactly what I'm asking if you're feeling generous ), I'd be interested.

Well, from screwing around in TESsnip I've got at least a start. I know that a 29, 3, 3 effect seems to be increased magnitude (and I think 30, 3, 3 is increased duration). So far, I've got all destruction spells increasing in damage by 15% for each mastery perk, but admittedly that was just a copy/paste/edit job on http://skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=1245, and I don't much like the process. What that mod does that I've copied is to make separate 1.15 magnifiers for fire, frost, and shock spell categories. I would rather just make a blanket effect for all destruction spells, but I can't figure out the code for that. Looking at Stability (because it works with all alteration spells) might help lead me in the right direction, but I've even managed to screw that up. I'll keep working on this and see if I can just make this myself.

And mysty, I've got a new respect for you and anyone else who has the patience to make a full mod through careful editing like this. Obviously, I've been looking at your mod a ton too. It must have taken quite some time for you to figure out half this crap. What tools are you using? I'm using the updated version of TESsnip for Skyrim.


EDIT: Copying the effects from Stability is working now. Not sure what I screwed up before, but I'm now able to make mastery perks that extend the duration of all alteration spells. It looks like alteration is 18 in the check, so I'm going to screw around with that number and see if I can get this working on other spell schools.

EDIT 2: I'm sure now that 29, 3, 3 is magnitude and 30, 3, 3 is duration increase. Alteration is 18 and Conjuration is 19. I assume the other schools follow in alphabetic order. I'm on the right track now, so I can hopefully have this mod ready by the end of the day. I still need to get a haircut for a job interview tomorrow and clean some crap up for Christmas, but hopefully I'll have the time.

Try using SkyEdit as that now has limited ability to mess with spell records.

You might also want to check out this mod, which I believe is brilliant in its simplicity: http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=2585

Skyedit can't do anything with perks yet, which is what I need. Also, I've seen tejon's mod and I agree that it's good. However, it only fixes the problem with spells not gaining damage on enchantments. It doesn't change the fact that spells also don't scale in power as you take perks. I still plan to work on this when I get home.

I'm using TESsnip from the fallout mod manager, and taking a lot of notes. I contributed to this page: http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Tes5Mod:Mod_File_Format/MGEF and refer to it extensively for editing magic effects. Also, http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Tes5Mod:Mod_File_Format/CTDA_Field and the functions pages linked from there are EXTREMELY useful for figuring out conditionals, although you'll need to do a lot of conversions between short unsigned, ints, and hex values and it's a LOT to keep track of...

Mostly, it's an exercise in patience and I've hit my share of "brick walls," so I'm hoping things will get much easier with the release of the CK. I'd love to see what you come up with, and please feel free to study my edits or ask how I did something.

I've currently got alteration mastery perks all finished. Luckily, changing things is a very simple copy/past/edit job from here on out now that I have these done. I'm glad I won't need to get into the kind of effort you just described for this, but again, I certainly can respect you and anyone else who is willing to go through with so much work. As far as what I've come up with? Just exactly what I described: all mastery perks now add 15% to either magnitude or duration, depending on the school.

I chose the 15% value because it multiplies five times to produce 2.0113571875, which is extremely close to a doubling effect. The weapon perks all get doubled damage for taking five perks, so it just felt right to use the same value for magic schools, or at least as close to it as I can get. With all five alteration mastery spells, I'm getting 120 seconds on stuff that was previously 60 seconds. Adding Stability pushes it to 181, which is extremely close to what I intended.

EDIT: Hmm... Illusion's an odd one. I think I'll actually increase duration for that school rather than magnitude as I had planned. Dual Casting and all of the perks in it already make it work on nearly everything. It's more useful if the mastery perks increase duration instead, plus then I'd affect stuff like Invisibility and Muffle too.

EDIT 2: And... all done! As expected, the conditionals for each spell school increased numerically in their normal alphabetic order. Knowing from Stability that alteration was 18, this meant that conjuration is 19, destruction 20, illusion 21, and restoration 22. Hopefully that information will help anyone else who might endeavor to do something like this. I've learned a lot from screwing around with this stuff. I've tested the novice perks and everything else was delicious copy pasta, but I'm going to test the remaining perks just to be totally sure this all works correctly. I should have a link to a Nexus download page available soon for anyone interested.

EDIT 3: I can't change topic titles and this topic includes discussion on creating the mod, so I made a separate http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1322028-better-spell-mastery/, which includes the http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=4374.