Tdroid

Seems about right.

Never played Thief, actually, but it is one of those old series which I am definitely interested in playing at some point

I was all over the place in general back then I remember Jorn Horn-Hand; he's that character that just sort of dropped out after a couple of posts before I finally returned for my glorious trolling in Chapter 2

To be fair, given the fact that the new trilgy even made think more fondly back on the Prequels... sigh... Hopefully the Elder Scrolls won't go this route with 6.

A) You literally don't need to know the game any better than as a mage, since you can buy a lot of the enchantments you need from the same places you buy new spells: Temples, churches, Mages Guilds and Telvanni Halls. You're just also going to find them as random loot, with various merchants and as quest rewards on top of that. Edit: And those "X Damage" things are damned powerful, since you can fire off 4-5 blasts in a very short periode of time. B) I double checked and it was more like 2-2.5 seconds. Still about 2-2.5 seconds longer than enchantments. Of course, Skyrim has its own problems, but at least you're not competing with 0.something cast time spells in that game as a mage. C) Intimate knowledge in the form of "let me check the inventory of these magic merchants", "let's look at this enchanted thing I saw in this regular merchant's inventory", "let's hold on to the ramdom loot and quest rewards that makes me much more powerful" and "I can make custom spells, so maybe I can find someone to make custom enchantments too". It's about as obscure as the intimate knowledge needed for being a mage, which is to say not at all. It's only really viable in Oblivion thanks to "Weakness" spells, given how ludicrous the health values get (and arguably only the self stacking Weakness to Magic after a certain point), but it is still more efficient than using weapons. Works reasonably well in Skyrim too, if you keep Weakness poisons handy. Just too bad they're limited to poisons this time around.

I don't think anyone with experience from a moderate range of games would argue the Elder Scrolls series are anything worth mentioning when it comes to mechanics in general. The combat is just sort of there, neither very engaging or aggrivating, as a vehicle to explore the world. Which is why I think Oblivion and Daggerfall aged so poorly; there isn't much in the way of meaningful exploration.

A) It's not really even "eventually", when it comes down to it, since enchanted items aren't more expensive than spells, but a lot more reliable early on. Being a mage is arguably only better for a very short periode (probably somewhere in the levels 5-10 or thereabouts), because being a mage is highly impractical until those levels and after level 10 the resource scaling for the player is absolutely insane. The headache of the menu I can grant you, but that applies to spells as well, since they really did go for the "flavor over brevity" approach with a lot of them, especially a lot of the more useful ones. Neat idea, annoying in practice. Of course, the sorting tabs in the inventory helps a lot. As does the hotkey menues, where you should assign the most commonly used ones. B) It's about 3 seconds, which is a great deal harder to manage than the 0.something seconds an enchantment has, especially with some motherhubbert charging at you with intents of tearing you a new behind. When it comes down to it, you can make passable enchantments for well under 1000 gold for most of the early game (or just buy them), since you don't need stuff that blows up mountains yet. A simple fireball or lightningbolt can be extremely effective when 4-5 castings of a 10-30 damage spells in the time of a normal one still averages around 80-100 damage, after all. The recharge time is only long on items that has an extraordinary high enchantment value, meaning a very complicated (and therefor likely situational) spell. The simple spells you use regularly can work on petty, lesser and common values with ease. On top of them recharging independently, of course, which means that you can actually cast the same spell between 1 or 10 or 100 different resource pools a lot of the time. Then there is the additional imbalance of the Enchant skill lowering the cost of using enchantments, but that is so overkill that it isn't even necessary to factor into it. Just a fun fact. C) Min-maxing is overkill in this game, to be sure, but it doesn't change the fact that the way magic was handled is poor, clunky and stacked heavily against actual mages when compared to random motherhubberts with a sack load of shiny rings and amulets. With 30 Int and 9 Enchant, no less. A proper enchanter is more like this: The only thing saving Morrowind's weak mechanics is probably the laughably low difficulty the base game has. And the world building.

By "village idiot" I mean characters like my Orc barbarian, with minimum Int and no magical aptitude at all. You get an obscene amount of magic stuff with both simple and more complicated spells both as random loot and quest rewards (not to mention you can easily buy them at comparable prices to spells), so it's an inevitability that your non-spellcaster will surpass your spellcaster at magic simply by playing the game and you don't sell of all their enchanted loot. This is prior to making your own stuff. When you do start to amass the gold necessary to make custom enchantments (which isn't hard, since it is Morrowind, after all), all bets are off. The only mage that requires any form of ass busting is the traditional mage that masters and casts his own spells. Spell holding items have 1) no casting time, 2) independent resource pools and 3) naturally recharge on their own. Even in the case of you having a weaker spell in your ring than the one at your fingertips, you can fire at least 4 or 5 of it in the same time at a lower relative cost, making any power difference of the spell itself pointless. It can stand on its own in the sense that the game is mechanically simple and it takes very little time before you're overtuned compared to most enemies in the game with a handful of exceptions, but that's more on the game's overal low difficulty than anything. If they hadn't included level scaling for certain types of enemies, like Daedra and Undead, the game could barely muster anything worthy to stand before a half decent lvl 12 character prior to the expansions, which seem to be between 30 and 50. Spellcasting is janky and made entirely pointless by the enchantment mechanics. Just buying a couple of simple enchantments ("Now available at affordable princes at Tribunal and Imperial Cult shrines, as well as Mages Guild and Telvanni Halls, near you," read in commercial narrator's voice) to start off and looting, questing and eventually making the rest is just better than levelling as a mage.

The main problem with the magic is that if you just replaced each of the spells you use, regardless of the build, with a magic ring containing the same spell, you're always better off. The village idiot with a sack of magic rings is a better mage than the Telvanni Master Wizards. And that it can't stand on its own as a playstyle just reinforces the point that it isn't good. I can forgive it's jankiness, but I'll never see it as good. It's there on sufferance, like the somewhat annoying girlfriend of a guy you like to party with that insists on joining you. It's not a deal breaker, but you'd be having a lot more fun if she didn't keep pissing off other girls

Unfortunately, the graphics aren't the only shitty things about it. The gameplay too; it's something to be tolerated rather than enjoyed. And the spellcasting. Despite the number of effects in the game, spellcasting is a chore. In fact, the most powerful mage I ever had was an orc barbarian with 30 Int that hauled some 100lbs worth of enchanted rings with him: The individual and regenerating magicka pools and instant casting makes being a regular spellcaster pretty damn terrible when compared to just being a hoarder. Morrowind pretty much only makes due because of the world building. Which, ironically, makes it age a lot better than Oblivion and it's lack thereof, despite the more engaging gameplay.

Hi... I'm back... Had some busy days at work, so this place completely slipped my mind for a little while... But I'm back now!

Sounds good to me. Sorry that I went silent for a little while, something came up with work and stuff.

Funny. And I can appreciate the yellow sabers; they don't get enarly enough love. Gotta love that KOTOR Sentinel.

I'm watching the stream and they're talking about Blackreach and stuff (something about "what else has been down there?" etc.), so my money is on the ol' Volkihar being somehow related to Blackreach. The vampire kinda looked like it was going to an underground place in the trailer, after all.

On and off. Haven't caught up on Vvardenfell and Summerset yet, but I did play through Elsweyr. Definitely going to do this one though. Sad that there doesn't seem to be a new class coming though.