1. Allow robes to carry 3 enchantments.
Seriously, why is there yet another Elderscrolls games where you get punished for wearing robes? It's actually a relatively simple problem to remedy. Robes start out with 2 enchantment "slots", and if you master Enchantment you can put 3 enchantments on a robe, and 2 on a piece of armor. There, problem solved, robes are useful. No physical protection or perk bonuses, but more raw magical potential. For most robes this would simply mean that you can double enchant them on top of the regen bonus they carry, so that they still have something going for themselves even if your character is an enchanter. Especially mages should benefit from enchanting, not be nudged out of their niche by the fact that enchanting renders robes useless.

2. Allow speech to be used in a fight.
Why is it that a character who is good at intimidating people can only do so in a polite conversation, but has no capability of scaring a hapless bandit in a fur thong out of attacking a guy wearing Deadric armor and wielding a huge flaming sword? Speech could grant you additional "shouts" that can affect humanoid opponents in some way. That would make the speech tree a lot more useful. Also when an enemy yields you should be able to talk them into surrendering if you have a high speech skill.

3. Trapped Chests.
I'm not talking about the little ropes coming out of chests sometimes, I'm talking about genuine trapped chests like in Morrowind. Let's face it, the lockpick skill is worthless, and its primarily because of one thing: You have lots and lots of lockpicks to break. Now you might say "The obvious solution is to give the player fewer lockpicks", but that would force people to pick and chose which locks to pick, and allow them no attempts at all of them. Instead there needs to be a limitation of how many attempts you can make on a single lock, and that's where trapped chests come in. A trapped chest has some kind of device inside, like, let's say, a little glass tube full of acid next to the tumblers, and too many careless attempts to pick the lock will result in breaking it and cause an explosion that destroys the chest and its contents. Not every chest is trapped of course, but trapped chests have by far the best loot.

I am for these ideas and improvements.

The idea of having three enchants on robes is alright. If you delve into alchemy/enchanting together, it's easy to craft gear that will allow you to make one or two schools of magic free of charge. My Nord has a 100% restoration deduction on spells. If they allowed three, it might be too much. who knows though. As far as the other two ideas, it reminded me more of a D&D example. Your allowed to intimidate in battle to get the edge, and often times your faced with poisoned or booby trapped chests, etc. It added a lot of fun to games like Neverwinter nights, etc. All in all I like the ideas.

The magicka cost enchantments stacking until your spells are free is a design flaw in the game that Bethesda needs to fix anyways. They should swap the effect of fortify spell schools to increasing their effectiveness or damage, not reduce the cost.
Magic should be about having limited magicka to produce powerful effects, not about having unlimited magicka to produce weaksauce.

I'd love to have hand-to-hand scale better, and that's about it for me.

trapped chest would be terrible, all locks should pickable at all times, the "force lock" crap in fallout was annoying enough, to fix lockpicking combine it with pick pocking, call it "steady hands"

suggestion 1 is good

speech needs a bit more but I'd like more interaction between friendly NPCs.
the ability to scare off enemies would be meh. but a taunt would be ok but still more needs to be in speech, its a matter of what though.

I like #1 because I like wearing robes and enchanting things.

Why? What's the point of even putting locked chests in the game if all it does is slightly delay how long they take to open?
I agree that Lockpicking and Pickpocket should have been combined into one skill, but that's not something they can fix after the fact.

I love the idea of using the Speech skill to intimidate bandits to not attack.

Never thought of the reduction in casting as a flaw. More of a bonus. But I can see how casting something for nothing every time would be rather rigged in a world. Even the strongest of enemies eventually run low on energy and stamina. I'm all for the chests, etc. I wish there were more traps in skyrim as well, different types of them, really. I'm basing most of his ideas off of Never winter nights mechanics for chests and traps, etc. It just made things a lot more fun, you never knew when you were going to accidentally trip a wire or touch a stone and incapacitate half your team. It makes things more of a challenge.

The idea about speech is good, but a similar issue arises in rp games. If someone wants to role with a healer only, but are faced with physical harm, etc. It's hard for them to counter with damage, much like running around Skyrim using only speech would do you more harm then good. It would be neat to attempt to play the game from the perspective of speech, from intimidating enemies, to completely stopping the war with words alone. It's far fetched, sure, but the idea itself sounds fun.

well there is one thing that could sorta work for the speech one in the OP.

It would make a lot more sense if the bonus structure for magic were based on actually making your spells stronger, not on just allowing you to cast more of them.

Magic in Skyrim is very flawed anyways, in a variety of ways.
For one, the only way to really deal more damage with magic is to use a higher ranking spell, but that causes problems if you don't want to always blow up the whole room. What if you have a companion with you, or a summon out and you want to shoot a spell that only harms one single target? You simply can't do master level damage with such a spell, because all the single target spells come earlier in the magic progression.
There is also no way of ever upping the damage you do with magic by increasing your skill or getting enchantments or anything, it always just reduces the magicka cost, so you can cast more spells, but that leads to a situation where you feel like you're just torturing enemies to death with tiny ammounts of damage.

The really big reason why zero cost spells are a major flaw is relatively easily revealed. Why can you increase your magicka pool when you level up? Why can you gain gear that regenerates your magicka? Why are there a variety of talents that allow you to gain magicka in a fight? None of those systems serve any purpose if it was genuinely intended for people to have enchantments that reduce magicka costs to 0. The best, most powerful mage in the current system is one that wears enchtanted platemail that reduces magicka costs to 0 and never put a single levelup into his magicka stat. Doesn't that seem like it runs contrary to the entire games system?

I like number 1 but there's not many unenchanted hoods and robes to begin with most of the cool hoods and robes are already enchanted (shrouded hoods and robes) or unobtainable (psijic robes)

Yea, there aren't enough robes in the game to begin with, that's for sure. Unfortunately Bethesda seems to have absolutely nobody at their office who likes the idea of the "pure mage" and champions that playstyle when people there start cutting corners left and right when it comes to items and systems that make that sort of thing worthwhile.

The Archmage robe looks quite awful too, like some kind of frilly poncho.
Diadems and Crowns are mage items as far as I'm concerned, and make up for the lack of unenchanted hoods. Those should also be able to carry 3 enchantments.

There is also a severe lack of cloth gloves in Skyrim.

yeah I agree but I think the circlets look girlish/regal If there's not going to be unenchatable hoods why have enchanted ones? mages are really getting the short end of the stick in skyrim

Noty a flaw, designed that way, freedom of choice, be responsible for your own actions, don't use it if you don't want to etc etc etc.

Mages have been getting the short end of the stick ever since Morrowind in Elderscrolls. Sure, in Oblivion they were considered overpowered, but that was also more the result of a bunch of bugs and design flaws, not to mention, that game was also devoid of a real reason to wear robes and had the same lack of variety where clothes were concerned.

That's a bogus argument and you know it. If it was all about freedom of choice then why don't I have the choice of enchanting my gear so that my spells cost magicka but do enough damage to be viable without infinite casting?

The whole "Don't use it if you don't want to" line is BS if there is no alternative to keep magic viable in the long run.

Enemies in Skyrim will outscale the amount of damage you can do before you run out of magicka eventually, that's inevitable. Currently the only working solution to that problem is to completely disable the magicka system through enchantments.

This renders all of the following systems useless:

The Magicka Stat and leveling it up.
Racial bonuses to magicka or regeneration.
Regeneration or Magicka Bonus gear.
Magicka or Magicka Bonus potions.
More powerful spells having higher costs.
Spell cost reduction Perks.
Magicka regeneration or absorption perks.
Magicka draining effects and spells.
In combat regen adjustment.

All of these are no longer in any way a factor once you enchant your gear to have no magicka costs.

Now the other possible solution to the problem of enemies outlasting your magicka pool would be to increase the damage you can do with a spell.

This doesn't render any other game systems useless.



Are you seriously going to tell me that it isn't a giant oversight that fortify spell school enchantments are cost reduction instead of efficiency increases?!

not only that but cost reduction shouldn't be necessary the mana to magic is ridiculous cost reduction just let's non-pure mages be mages and pure mages getting enchantments that they don't need it's like getting a fortify heavy armor armor enchantment when you reached the armor cap and need health but there is no health enchantment

I want to open chests with spells.

I want to levitate.

I want to reduce the damage enemies deal.

I want to reduce my own carried weight.

I want to swing faster with my two-handed weapons.
...

...
So, they remove possibilities that are in the LORE, and add possibilities that obviously would NEVER be a part of the lore?

1 000 000 000 000 magicka cost world-ending spell?
No problem.
A child can cast it, if he can concentrate for the two-hour casting time.

Balance is important, even in singleplayer games.
Because when you have to choose, while playing, between "easy" and "hard" at every second, you are merely gimping yourself whenever you choose hard.
I don't touch the difficulty slider for the same reason.
I wany my actions to have consequences, and I want the game to be hard WITHOUT me gimping my characters intentionally.

In skyrim, I find I have to PLAN characters to not be too powerful, because characters that develop naturally become severely overpowered around level 15-20 and one-shot everything but bosses after that point.

Roleplaying is a two-way game:

YOU know what your character would do, and someone else sets the limits for what he can do in their game world and sets up the challenges for the player.

Why would anyone NOT use cost reduction when they know it is there?
What reasons do a character have to not cast spells for 0 magicka when he can?
Does he not care for his life or the lives of the inhabitants in Tamriel?

Yes, as a father and grown-up, I have different views on my actions than children will have.
My characters CARE about NPCs, and would not be able to live with themselves if they used a longbow instead of the ebony bow they found, when the dragon killed two guards.
Would using the ebony bow have saved one or both?
Possibly. Therefore my character is scarred for life.
Obviously, he would never do that ingame -- he would switch to the ebony bow and the best arrows to save the lives of the guards.
THAT is roleplaying.
Getting involved in the game world and acting as if your character and the NPCs are real living creatures, who take independant and intelligent choices.

When my character faces the choice of "free spells" OR "the risk of people dying because I did not go for free spells" -- what do you think he or she would choose?

Why wasn't there just perks instead: Spells of this school cost 0 magicka.
Freedom of choice, right?

And then the one-handed tree could have a perk to deal infinite damage on power-attacks.
Freedom of choice, one again.

Chameleon 100; Freedom of choice.

Yea, the whole "freedom of choice" argument breaks down alone when you think about all the hundreds of ways to break your game that were deliberately removed from the Elderscrolls in between games.

I mean let's not forget that in Morrowind you could litterally make a character that could fly at will and teleport around the map.

I haven't been experimenting with enchanting too much and didn't even bother to realize the fortify destruction enchantment reduces cost rather than damage output...and i've upgraded my magic to 300 so i could cast a decent amount of destruction spells. seems like a waste now if i could just do the 0% magic thing so i guess ill just pretend that i dont have the fortify destruction enchantment. I agree that that is a poor design choice by the developers and would much rather have a system where enchantments improve magic effectiveness rather than reduce cost.

and the speech and barter skills have been combined from previous games, but i think its misleading to keep "speech" as the name for the skill tree. It is cleary more useful and geared toward bartering with the actual dialogue aspects thrown in (persuade, intimidate) as a minor gameplay mechanic. Im not saying that they should change the name of the skill tree to barter, but that is it's primary function. it's supposed to be a passive skill. Making it more useful as a skill tree would be interesting, but i think it serves its purpose.

As for lockpicking, it is useful in the beginning but becomes more and more useless as you progress and have tons of lockpicks. bethesda could go back to their old ways and just not let you attempt to pick the lock until you are a certain level...but It is nice to have the freedom to attempt to pick a master level lock when you're level 5 even though its probably not worth the effort. I wouldn't mind the idea of trapped chests exploding but i think it would piss alot of ppl off unless there was some kind of perk to detect trapped chests