I'm glad there's no degradation in the game.

"No Degradation" Mods are usually at the top of my list for mod downloads.

Degradation is nothing but a time sink and annoying, there's nothing immersive it.

Id like degradation back in no matter how awfully it was implemented in previous games. I hate seeing smithing workplaces as i explore and thinking how useless they were. With degradation, they'd be more like alchemy tables that allow you to replenish potions and make them a welcome sight while exploring

I miss the feature myself, I mean it works pretty well in Fallout New Vegas. Things would degrade but not a a huge rate, and it gave more meaning to extra loot you would find and help slow down the infinite money pit you would have other wise.

I didn't care how fast stuff in the Fallout games broke down, it was still far easier to repair than stuff in Oblivion was, especially with mods that added scrap metal to the repair tables in FO3. In a heavily modded Oblivion it seems to me that stuff breaks down faster in it than either Fallout game. Repair is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay easier to level up in FO3 / FONV, repair in Oblivion, especially Vanilla Oblivion, levels up slower than a snail in molasses in January if its not a Major Skill and repair hammers aren't exactly sold in infinite supply. I've been using Oblivion XP for ages so its not much of an issue since I can level it up easier like in both Fallouts. Then again, regardless of mods, when you get the skill you can easily make a Fortify Armorer spell for like +100 and only use one hammer, but you are still SOL on repairing magic stuff. Im glad repairing stuff is gone from Skyrim, but I still am disappointed by other missing things, like Attributes.

i had an idea about weapon degeneration, but it would exclude breaking the item, just lower the quality. that way there's always a reason to use the grinding bench.

FormIDs don't help in this case since the FormID is the same for every object of the same type. So unless you want all Iron Greatswords to degrade equally when you use just one it won't work. Reference IDs are generated on the fly and don't stay the same for a single inventory object unless it's a persistent reference (and as soon as you pick it up it won't be persistent anymore, so...).

I'm not sure if the map in OBSE includes support for reference IDs as keys as well (though I don't know why it shouldn't; they are just a 32-bit number internally anyway), you'll have to ask ianpatt and his crew about that. In any case, I can see a few ways around it. Every non-stackable object already has a unique ID inside the game, it's just a matter of finding and tracking it properly.

As far as I can tell reference IDs for inventory objects (dynamic items) are not unique. Drop an item, check its ref ID, pick it up again, put it in a container, take it, drop it again - the ID is not the same anymore. Same happens between loading save games.

I'm glad somebody said something... I was highly offended when I read the word "fix." I'm so angry that my hands are shaking of the likes that nobody has seen before.

I think this was done for the reasons aforementioned: Why would I, a mage, want to train smithing just so i can keep my sword in top notch condition. I hated absolutely hated the armorer skill in oblivion, Mostly because EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER had it high. If you were slightly serious in playing the game, you had to have armorer 50+, either for the endurance or for repairing magical items. This way it feels a lot more immersive, I don't need to train smithing for my mage or my rogue, or any other character if i don't want to. Furthermore, isn't it just silly to be in the middle of nowhere, grab out a hammer, hit your bow and suddenly it works better? In 0 time as well? I just assume that whenever you visit a blacksmith here you get your weapons fixed to topnotch quality. Heck if you're that worried, gold dump somewhere and say you used it to pay for the repairs.

I think this is a very good roleplaying decision, and the only better one would have been to add different ways to open locks. This is the only skill i find raising with my mage even though it makes no sense, but i really (as a player) hate passing by chests that have potentially great loot.

I think you nailed it right there.

Knowing that skill points are limited, it would really svck to be forced to spend points in a skill for the sole purpose of keeping armor/weapons intact because of game design,
that particular skill would be required of every class playable in one form or another.

Maybe in TES6 they could also remove player health. Quite annoying to keep healing all the time, heh.

I personally think the best way of handling this is to just slowly degrade items you've improved back to their default stats.

You don't need a repairing skill to be effective. In oblivion my Mage would drop into the smith in town and get his gear fixed. Never had to repair stuff himself.

I would prefer some form of degredation system, but I agree that by default Oblivion's rate of item decay was waay to high. I would have loved having to repair my gear at the forge, or pay a blacksmith to repair it, but it should last for several dungeon expeditions before it starts wearing out.

... and you can track all of it. Not easily, maybe, but possible.

I am big on immersion in my games. Very big, in fact. But I for one am perfectly ok "role playing" that my character takes care of his gear when I am not there. really, the idea that role play and constant inventory management need to go hand in hand in games is tedious. I for one will not be sorry to see either the leveling/xp and the constant inventory management finally make their way out of role playing games for good and all.

Please devs, role playing means dialogue options, choices and consequences and making allies and enemies. It means opening up options with speech, talking your way through a bandit dungeon, bluffing the baddies and myriad capers, schemes and options.

Not a constant stream of loot, repair, sell, repeat. Really, that isn't role playing, its dungeon crawling.

And contrary to popular belief, there is a difference between the two.

But how? If I have a value assigned to a weapon with a certain reference ID, save and load a save game later the reference ID will be gone and the weapon will have a completely different one. If you're lucky the weapon will simply have lost the assigned value (which would render the mod useless), but most likely the game will crash if a script tries to access an ID that doesn't exist anymore. That is what happened in Oblivion at least.

Like I said, there is no way I know of to track specific references for all kinds of random dynamic items since they don't have persistent references and each time you put them in a container or load a save game they are technically completely new items that have nothing to do with the items you used before you put them in a container or the ones you had before you loaded the save game.

Isn't attaching a script to an item something internal? I seem to recall instances in Oblivion where weapons with attached scripts got their reference ID changed and still had the script attached.

Also, I agree with weapon degradation, but only if it's a very high value, and NOT based on any skill. You can make an argument for how fast weapons degraded in earlier TES games at lower levels, but it was still way too fast and as said before it forced most everyone using weapons to go into Armorer. In example, I think a melee Tank clearing a dungeon should have their weapon and armor reduced in by ~20% by the end.

Call me crazy, but didn't Bethesda say that's how it was going to work? Weapons and armor would have base stats, and you could improve them at grindstones and workbenches which lets them do more damage and protect better. They'd then degrade with use back to their original stats (but not any lower), so you'd need to go back to the grindstone/workbench if you wanted to improve them again.

If we're lucky, there may be remnants of this somewhere in the .esm, and only requires changing some globals or scripts or something to get working again.

Well we can improve items thats change their stats to be better from normal up to legendary,
perhaps we can create few levels below normal condition thats will have lower stats like rusted, bent, ragged, frayed, etc.
In such cases improvement of items will be some sort of repairing
Will be even more good if we able dynamically change such condition levels of item with scripts, when items are used, we can make different rates for certain materials how often item degrade from usage (thats will work with vanilla items) as well make equation based on item cost, weight and damage\armor rating where more costly item with large weight and good parameters will degrade slower then item made from light cheap material with fewer stats (in such cases thats will work with any items even with added by mods)

I too miss this feature, and hope to see it back in soon. I really want there to be some statistical reasons as to why I would use one weapon over another (such as yes, I could use the Silver Longsword, but it breaks a hell of a lot faster than this Steel one that does slightly less damage) and it added in a small bit of difficulty and realism into the matter. Not to mention, it would actually make Smithing a bit more of a viable skill, because as for right now, I feel as though it's a bit hollow.

I imagine once the CK releases, and the UI is figured out, adding it in should be no trouble at all.

To be honest, you didn't have to train the Armorer skill in Oblivion and Morrowind. You could've just handed your sword in to the local blacksmith and have them repair it for you for a variable sum of gold. I know that's what I did with my first mage character.

Of course, the only problem with that is that gold was ridiculously easy to come by in vanilla Oblivion, so it basically made the Armorer skill moot.

In doubt, using the *ModLocalData function set from OBSE (... as soon as we have them in SKSE), but I doubt we'll have to do it, frankly. How does the game engine keep track of a weapon which has a custom enchantment on it? Or how does it keep track of a weapon which is poisoned?

What the game engine can do and what we can do with scripts are two very different things. I know that in Oblivion what you suggest wasn't possible, not even with OBSE. That's why there was never a mod that recharged all the enchanted items in your inventory over time (like in Morrowind). There was only one that recharged the weapon you currently had equipped. And the reason was that you couldn't even get the specific reference of an inventory item. You could only get the temporary reference of the currently equipped item - and in that case it wasn't even needed to keep the reference between save games or when moving the item between containers. Shortly before I stopped modding Oblivion there was some talk about implementing an OBSE feature that would assign a temporary reference to an inventory item so you could access it via script. But even that wouldn't help for keeping track of an items health since it would only be a temporary reference as well.

I'm not trying to convince you it will always be impossible to do such a thing, but you make it sound easier than it really is. OBSE couldn't do it, maybe SKSE can do it at some point in the future. But it's certainly not something I would count on.

I definitely wish they had ended up using this system, sounds like the perfect middle ground to me. Players who don't already level smithing for improving their weapons wouldn't be forced to level smithing to maintain them (since only the bonuses you added with smithing degrade).

Unfortunately I think it's already been covered why this is going to be very difficult to set up, since items don't have any unique way of being identified. I guess we won't know if it's possible until we can open everything up in the CK.

My only opinion on the crafting system. Because, we CAN create armor and weapons -EASILY- I would like to see armor and weapons degrade. so if they make a mod I will most likely download it. ( and watch me lose my most favored enchanted weapons without realizing it XP) Also to repair youd just need to use the forge, but it would be like an upkeep cost of metals.