[Keeley Stevens]

how about using keywords? would that help?

[Juan Cerda]

Wow, I had not seen this mod before. This is a must-have! Excellent ideas, and it really seems very balanced. You fixed many things that irked me when I played as a mage.

Do you have any plans concerning the availability of spells? Because it annoys me very much that I can't see certain spell tomes until I'm at a higher level. The usage of magic shouldn't be balanced out by hiding good spells, but by making them difficult to cast - which they are, so I don't see the point why I can't, for example, buy a Telekinesis spell right from the start.

Also, one school you haven't adressed yet is Illusion, it seems. In my opinion, this is the one school that could really benefit from scaled spells, since their effects are based on the level of your enemies - which is scaled, so once you're so powerful that you can use the better spells, you have to use them as well.
Another important issue is that up to skill level 90, almost all illusion spells only work on half the enemy types that one encounters in the game. An illusionist in a Dwemer ruin or a Nordic Barrow is helpless. If you could find some solution for this, I would be grateful.
And then there's the fact that you have to be an Expert Illusionist in order to cast Invisibility. This basically means that one of the most awesome spells of Illusion is hidden throughout the entire game and you find yourself thinking "this school is boring". Perhaps you could add lesser versions of that spell which can be bought earlier in the game? A spell that only gives you 50% invisibility instead of 100% comes to mind (so basically a weak Chameleon spell), if that's possible, or one that lasts only 5 seconds. Another option would be a spell that has to be maintained, which would make it useless in many situations since you don't have "Quiet Casting" at lower levels.

Don't know if I'm asking too much here. I find everything related to magic effects in the CK is horribly complicated.

[Chloe Yarnall]

Wow, I had not seen this mod before. This is a must-have! Excellent ideas, and it really seems very balanced. You fixed many things that irked me when I played as a mage.

Do you have any plans concerning the availability of spells? Because it annoys me very much that I can't see certain spell tomes until I'm at a higher level. The usage of magic shouldn't be balanced out by hiding good spells, but by making them difficult to cast - which they are, so I don't see the point why I can't, for example, buy a Telekinesis spell right from the start.

Also, one school you haven't adressed yet is Illusion, it seems. In my opinion, this is the one school that could really benefit from scaled spells, since their effects are based on the level of your enemies - which is scaled, so once you're so powerful that you can use the better spells, you have to use them as well.
Another important issue is that up to skill level 90, almost all illusion spells only work on half the enemy types that one encounters in the game. An illusionist in a Dwemer ruin or a Nordic Barrow is helpless. If you could find some solution for this, I would be grateful.
And then there's the fact that you have to be an Expert Illusionist in order to cast Invisibility. This basically means that one of the most awesome spells of Illusion is hidden throughout the entire game and you find yourself thinking "this school is boring". Perhaps you could add lesser versions of that spell which can be bought earlier in the game? A spell that only gives you 50% invisibility instead of 100% comes to mind (so basically a weak Chameleon spell), if that's possible, or one that lasts only 5 seconds. Another option would be a spell that has to be maintained, which would make it useless in many situations since you don't have "Quiet Casting" at lower levels.

Don't know if I'm asking too much here. I find everything related to magic effects in the CK is horribly complicated.

In vanilla there is a perk that lets illusion spells work on undead and constructs.

[Ymani Hood]

In vanilla there is a perk that lets illusion spells work on undead and constructs.

Yeah, at skill level 90, like I said.

[Nikki Hype]

I wonder if casting time of spells (especially 2-handed) can be increased

[Angelina Mayo]

how about using keywords? would that help?

Tried that first - the undead still resist for some reason. Just brewed a pot of coffee, so I'm good to face the CK this morning.

Wow, I had not seen this mod before. This is a must-have! Excellent ideas, and it really seems very balanced. You fixed many things that irked me when I played as a mage.

Do you have any plans concerning the availability of spells? Because it annoys me very much that I can't see certain spell tomes until I'm at a higher level. The usage of magic shouldn't be balanced out by hiding good spells, but by making them difficult to cast - which they are, so I don't see the point why I can't, for example, buy a Telekinesis spell right from the start.

Also, one school you haven't adressed yet is Illusion, it seems. In my opinion, this is the one school that could really benefit from scaled spells, since their effects are based on the level of your enemies - which is scaled, so once you're so powerful that you can use the better spells, you have to use them as well.
Another important issue is that up to skill level 90, almost all illusion spells only work on half the enemy types that one encounters in the game. An illusionist in a Dwemer ruin or a Nordic Barrow is helpless. If you could find some solution for this, I would be grateful.
And then there's the fact that you have to be an Expert Illusionist in order to cast Invisibility. This basically means that one of the most awesome spells of Illusion is hidden throughout the entire game and you find yourself thinking "this school is boring". Perhaps you could add lesser versions of that spell which can be bought earlier in the game? A spell that only gives you 50% invisibility instead of 100% comes to mind (so basically a weak Chameleon spell), if that's possible, or one that lasts only 5 seconds. Another option would be a spell that has to be maintained, which would make it useless in many situations since you don't have "Quiet Casting" at lower levels.

Don't know if I'm asking too much here. I find everything related to magic effects in the CK is horribly complicated.

First of all, thanks! Mages have so much potential for awesomeness in this game - it was just buried under gimmicks like free spellcasting and impact stunlocking, and needed a little room to grow as the player became more skilled.

I would be willing to look into making the spells available earlier - especially after I cap enchanting so that people can't enchant away the magicka cost completely. It may take some time, because I want to address enchanting, illusion, and conjuration first. So... illusion. I do plan to implement spell scaling that will allow you to cast illusion spells on higher level enemies as you become a more powerful illusionist (ie, based on skill level), but that really messes up the illusion perk tree. Someone over at Nexus was kind enough to share his ideas for a new perk tree, and I'll probably be asking for more suggestions soon. If you have experience playing as an illusion mage, I definitely want to hear from you! (I hadn't even THOUGHT about how useless illusion is in dwemer ruins or barrows for instance - I understand why the developers went that route, and I strive to remain lore friendly, but I'll be thinking about possible ways to work around that weakness now) so PLEASE feel free to make suggestions, even if they sound hard to implement. Feedback and suggestions from other players has shaped this mod from the beginning, and made it so much better than what it would've been otherwise!

[Brittany Abner]

I wonder if casting time of spells (especially 2-handed) can be increased

I believe there is a game setting that changes the casting time multiplier for dual cast spells, and each individual magic effect has a casting time (which can be overridden by the spell that calls it), so yes, and especially yes.

[lillian luna]

thank you, someone told me there's a very clear "casting time" field in the spell (or magic effect) page, I wonder how I have missed that.

[Robert]

There is a field in BOTH - In the magic effect, it is called "Casting Time" (under Spellmaking towards the bottom in the middle column) and in the spell if you uncheck "auto-calculate," allowing the spell to override the value specified in the magic effect. For the dual casting multiplier, go to Game->Settings and type "castingtime" in the search box - that should narrow it down so you can easily find the multiplier you want to change.

[Sammykins]

thankk you I am confused, I am looking stuff up with the Oblivion CS as well and I mix them up

[Scarlet Devil]

The healing/holy fire bug is much more insidious than I expected. I have to create 2 new spells and 2 new magic effects for each healing spell affected (as well as editing the current spell and magic effect used by each) to get it to - sort of! - work. Basically, undead were resisting the spells every time, and followers were assuming you were trying to attack them every time you healed them. I'll come back to it after getting some sleep and hopefully figure out why it's behaving so oddly. In the meantime, those of you testing the 2.0 beta, just be aware that healing others (or trying to damage undead with holy fire) is borked, but I am working on it!

If it helps I could take a look at what you've done and see if another set if eyes will shed more light on things?

[Peter lopez]

I figured out how to fix it, and have one of the 3 affected spells working correctly. Now I just need to update the other two!

[Steve Fallon]

OK, the bug *should* be fixed, and the new version is available on Nexus. (v2.0b4)

A couple of things to note: Healing Hands is not as smooth as I'd like (it heals 10 points, then another 10 a second later if you're still casting etc., so the overall amount healed is the same. It just *looks* choppy. This is due to limitations with scripting - there's no dispel function in Papyrus as far as I can tell, and if I call a concentration spell from within another spell, it doesn't STOP casting until you run out of magicka - not the effect I had in mind, but useful if I decide to change how permanent shield spells work! Anyhow, I have it calling a fire&forget spell every second which does work, just doesn't look as nice.
Healing spells can now be cast on corpses (no idea why?) - they don't do anything but eat up magicka, so try not to target dead bodies.
The Grand Healing spell will only damage undead if they are hostile. This was to prevent necromancers from damaging their own zombies, but I haven't tested it thoroughly, so let me know if you find anything odd.

Thanks!

[Matt Bigelow]

Healing magic now harms undead. this I wanted

[Darrell Fawcett]

Hi Mysty! First of all great work! If I can ask something though, do you plan on making a separate release for the 2.0 like it was for 1.3?

[Cedric Pearson]

A seperate release? Do you mean multiple .esp files? I have been thinking about this lately, and I'm leaning towards releasing the complete mod as a single .esp file, but possibly adding some optional .esps that overwrite some of the default values from the main mod to allow more options for players who want them.

[Claudia Cook]

Great work on this mod! I'm loving the holy fire from healing on undead. Once my priest gets Grand Healing, it'll be cool to use in undead dungeons as a sort of Consecration spell.

I had an idea that might be cool for turn undead spells based on the D&D turn undead. If the power of your turn undead (through your Restoration level), is twice that of the level of the turned undead, it is instantly destroyed and turned to ash instead of fleeing. If thats too powerful, maybe 3x their level could destroy them and 2x has them halted and cowering in place so you don't need to chase them through the dungeon.

[Nicola]

Yes exactly, I'm talking about separate esps. I asked for that because as for now, while I love destruction and especially restoration parts of your mod, I am not still sure about alteration. Since I didn't play much with it, I cannot say I do not like it for sure, but... Just to stay on the safe side, I think that multiple esps would give everyone a choice of what to use. Or optional esps if you so prefer, should do the same trick. I know I would end up using this just the same, because it's just too cool to pass, but I would really prefer to be able to set magic up the exact way I want it!

[Amber Ably]

For my game I have altered all the healing spells such that they give you restore stamina regardless of Respite perk at 20% the strength of the healing, but I limited the amount you get with Respite to 60% of the healing effect (so it only stacked to 80%, the 100% Respite gives you is too much imo)
Maybe you could do something similar?
Also, I'm not sure if the illusion enchantments (fear, frenzy, etc) are marked as destruction but if they are they should be changed to illusion so your fortify illusion stuff factors into charge use

[Alina loves Alexandra]

Mysty

I've either got a bug report or a lack of understanding of one of the spells.

I am using shield from alteration and not wearing armor. With the Lord birthsign and dual casting shield, I go to about 250 armor. After about a minute, there is a flash as if a spell effect is going away, but I still have the shield spell on, but now only 125ish armor. This lasts until the shield wears off.

I have only the first perk in alteration associated with giving shield bonus when not wearing armor.

It seems like you may be adding a second effect to give bonus for not wearing armor, but it does not take into account the duration bonus for dual casting.

Also, I do get the "shield removal" spell added to inventory message now and then but the spell is never added. I don't have to perk where I am supposed to get it.

[Racheal Robertson]

Can't wait to try the beta this weekend. I was wondering one thing though about the "permanent" shield spells. Is it possible to have several shield spells activated at the same time, provided you have enough magicka pool to sustain them ?
Because I was thinking, one might want to have a shield activated for additional armor, then another shield for more protection against fire... Or maybe a secondary shield would have its magicka cost increased by 2 or 3 unless you have a specific perk (like the last mage armor perk, in addition to reducing the magicka cost, would nullify or minimize the penalty for more than one shield).

Still, I have yet to try the mod so that was just an idea I had while reading the thread.

Great work, will update and enjoy anyway !! My favorite magic balance mod. I'll wait to see what's happening on Aleks balance mods (he hasn't redone his magic balance yet), as I was using a mix of both before, but yours will probably be enough now with the new updates.

[Lori Joe]

@Alendrin - sounds like a bug! I'll check it out and see if I can figure out what's going on. Which beta build are you using? I thought I fixed the multiple messagebox issue already, but if you're using the latest test build (beta 2.0b4) then I may need to re-look at that again too.

@Stormchild - I initially tried allowing you to stack shield spells just as you described, but I got a lot of comments about it being confusing, and there was an issue with the dispel not removing the elemental resistances correctly, so I removed the stacking and now you have to choose which spell is the best for the current situation, which is ok too. Glad you enjoy the mod so far! My to do list seems to be getting longer instead of shorter - so be looking for more updates to come.

@everyone - I am going to be pretty busy for a while. I have a game demo tonight, some more contract work for my studio to take care of, and then I'm heading to San Francisco for the Game Developers' Conference. (Maybe I'll get a chance to show my mod to some developers from Bethesda in person? How awesome would that be?) I know there are still plenty of bugs to squish; the downside of making the betas publicly available is that they tend to be buggier than my official releases, but the upside is that you guys catch them a lot faster than I can by myself so they get fixed sooner too! Anyhow, I just wanted to thank you for your patience, and apologize if I seem to disappear for while.

[kennedy]

@ Mysty:

I think I can confirm the message pop-up.
I had it happen a couple of times yesterday while running around Winterhold Academy.

Beta 2.0b4, by the way.

[Adam Kriner]

Both bugs I listed happened in beta 2.0b2 to 2.0b4

@Alendrin - sounds like a bug! I'll check it out and see if I can figure out what's going on. Which beta build are you using? I thought I fixed the multiple messagebox issue already, but if you're using the latest test build (beta 2.0b4) then I may need to re-look at that again too.

[lilmissparty]

@Mysty: Don't worry about taking time off, we'll understand if you have actual work to do Have fun at GDC!

Also, I no longer have issues with the Dispel Shield alert displaying more than once. I suspect that maybe I originally had the issue because I was using a mod that altered Alteration and was overriding Balanced Magic. After updating and resolving that load order issue everything has been working great.