Civil War Aftermath OOC #4

[The Good Doctor]

27 minutes ago, Tdroid said:

The gameplay too; it's something to be tolerated rather than enjoyed.

I’ve been legitimately enjoying it on my current run. It gets much better after you’ve leveled up your stats enough to hit your opponents with every swing and not fail every next casting. The early levels are a pain, but that’s why the game gives you tons of easy low level quest options in most major cities.

Magic is fine unless you do a pure spellcaster build, then the lack of regen becomes a pain. But if you make a build that doesn’t completely rely on it, then the extreme utility of all the different spell types more than makes up for the stunted magicka. My biggest problem with magic is the menu, and how all the spells are just on one page alphabetically instead of sorted by school. Makes scrolling through them to find the one I want a pain.

A pure spellcaster would be best off picking the Atronach birthsign, as that gives them easy ways to replenish magicka without hauling tons of potions or enchanted rings.

I enjoy the gameplay even more than Oblivion in many regards. There is more strategy to it. I think the shitty animations and the floatiness of the attacks hurts it more than the mechanics.

[BigBossBalrog]

And you can always uses mods to help fix some of the games flaws. 

It's also....18 years old at this point? It's practically a fossil, so I can forgive some early jank, because a majority of RPG's were like that 

[Tdroid]

2 minutes ago, The Good Doctor said:

I’ve been legitimately enjoying it on my current run. It gets significantly better after you’ve leveled up your stats enough to hit your opponents with every swing and not fail every next casting. The early levels are a pain, but that’s why the game gives you tons of easy low level quest options in most major cities.

Magic is fine unless you do a pure spellcaster build, then the lack of regen becomes a pain. But if you make a build that doesn’t completely rely on it, then the extreme utility of all the different spell types more than makes up for the stunted magicka. My biggest problem with magic is the menu, and how all the spells are just on one page alphabetically instead of sorted by school. Makes scrolling through them to find the one I want a pain.

A pure spellcaster would be best off picking the Atronach birthsign, as that gives them easy ways to replenish magicka without hauling tons of potions or enchanted rings.

I enjoy the gameplay even more than Oblivion in many regards. There is more strategy to it. I think the shitty animations and the floatiness of the attacks hurts it more than the mechanics.

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.

2 minutes ago, BigBossBalrog said:

And you can always uses mods to help fix some of the games flaws. 

It's also....15 years old at this point? It's practically a fossil, so I can forgive some early jank, because a majority of RPG's were like that 

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

[The Good Doctor]

11 minutes ago, Tdroid said:

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.

Only if you bust your ass to level enchanting and have a shitload of gold and filled soul gems to make enchanted rings for every occasion (which is a viable spellcaster playstyle). Otherwise, it comes down to what you loot, which besides artifacts is rarely better than spells you can buy or make for much less effort.

Second point is silly since there is no village idiot with a bag full of rings, and if there were, he presumably only got those rings by looting them or making them. If he made them, then he’s a wealthy and powerful enchanter instead of an idiot. If he looted them, odds are good that 90% of those rings are not gonna give him better spells than a Tevanni Master Wizard. Not to mention that the Telvanni happen to possess a large portion of the magical items in the game, so they make use of this too.

It can stand on its own. It’s just more difficult starting out and I wouldn’t recommend it to beginners. 

[Tdroid]

29 minutes ago, The Good Doctor said:

Only if you bust your ass to level enchanting and have a shitload of gold and filled soul gems to make enchanted rings for every occasion (which is a viable spellcaster playstyle). Otherwise, it comes down to what you loot, which besides artifacts is rarely better than spells you can buy or make for much less effort.

Second point is silly since there is no village idiot with a bag full of rings, and if there were, he presumably only got those rings by looting them or making them. If he made them, then he’s a wealthy and powerful enchanter instead of an idiot. If he looted them, odds are good that 90% of those rings are not gonna give him better spells than a Tevanni Master Wizard. Not to mention that the Telvanni happen to possess a large portion of the magical items in the game, so they make use of this too.

It can stand on its own. It’s just more difficult starting out and I wouldn’t recommend it to beginners. 

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.

Edited February 11, 2020 by Tdroid

[The Good Doctor]

7 minutes ago, Tdroid said:

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

Eventually, yeah, you will have plenty of enchanted items to choose from. But it takes even more time and work to reach that level of versatility in gear than it does to simply learn the spells yourself. Not to mention the incredible headache of sorting through a bunch of arbitrarily-named rings ("I need a levitation spell. Am I searching for Ring of Flying, Levitation Ring, Cloud Band, or Metallic Circle of St. Olms' Nongravitational Extravaganza?") that clutter your inventory and are more annoying to sort through than potions (which a natural wizard build can get by only carrying a minimal amount of if they know the game well -hence why I said it’s not the best beginner build).

17 minutes ago, Tdroid said:

Spell holding items have 1) no casting time, 2) independent resource pools and 3) naturally recharge on their own.

1) Casting times are not long at all for normal spells. 2) and 3) go together, but that recharge time is generally even longer than the time it takes magicka recharge when resting. And a large magicka pool far surpasses the amount of use you will get out of enchanted items you are likely to find in the world. On a mage build, I can cast "levitate" many more times in one adventure than I can use the Boots of the Apostle enchantment, and still have the magicka to spare. Of course, a smart mage would use both.

21 minutes ago, Tdroid said:

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,

This is true, and it applies to almost all playstyles. Morrowind becomes very easy after a point, making min-maxing downright overkill. Sure, a late game enchanter or adventurer who has created/collected lots of magical items might be better than a pure wizard who mostly relies on his own magicka, but not without the drawback of dealing with that annoying bag of rings.

And so for me, it becomes a question of being as effective as possible while mitigating the annoyances that I can do without. That means carrying as few items as necessary and cutting down on the tedium of things like needing a magical ring for every occasion. Is it optimal? Probably. But it’s also annoying and not necessary for such an easy game.

[Tdroid]

29 minutes ago, The Good Doctor said:

A) Eventually, yeah, you will have plenty of enchanted items to choose from. But it takes even more time and work to reach that level of versatility in gear than it does to simply learn the spells yourself. Not to mention the incredible headache of sorting through a bunch of arbitrarily-named rings ("I need a levitation spell. Am I searching for Ring of Flying, Levitation Ring, Cloud Band, or Metallic Circle of St. Olms' Nongravitational Extravaganza?") that clutter your inventory and are more annoying to sort through than potions (which a natural wizard build can get by only carrying a minimal amount of if they know the game well -hence why I said it’s not the best beginner build).

B) 1) Casting times are not long at all for normal spells. 2) and 3) go together, but that recharge time is generally even longer than the time it takes magicka recharge when resting. And a large magicka pool far surpasses the amount of use you will get out of enchanted items you are likely to find in the world. On a mage build, I can cast "levitate" many more times in one adventure than I can use the Boots of the Apostle enchantment, and still have the magicka to spare. Of course, a smart mage would use both.

C) This is true, and it applies to almost all playstyles. Morrowind becomes very easy after a point, making min-maxing downright overkill. Sure, a late game enchanter or adventurer who has created/collected lots of magical items might be better than a pure wizard who mostly relies on his own magicka, but not without the drawback of dealing with that annoying bag of rings.

And so for me, it becomes a question of being as effective as possible while mitigating the annoyances that I can do without. That means carrying as few items as necessary and cutting down on the tedium of things like needing a magical ring for every occasion. Is it optimal? Probably. But it’s also annoying and not necessary for such an easy game.

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.

Edited February 11, 2020 by Tdroid

[BigBossBalrog]

I think alot of problems with Morrowind's magic system carry over to the other TES games. My personal problem with it is the lack of scaling, and how Magic is just really unviable on higher difficulties, and during the late game.  Right now it's way too static, especially in Skyrim. 

If they added a scaling system, I think alot of my problems with it would be fixed. Something like how Dark Souls does it, in which your stats scale with how powerful your magic is, and even your elementary magic is powerful if you invest enough into whatever stat governs it. 

[Tdroid]

2 minutes ago, BigBossBalrog said:

I think alot of problems with Morrowind's magic system carry over to the other TES games. My personal problem with it is the lack of scaling, and how Magic is just really unviable on higher difficulties, and during the late game.  Right now it's way too static, especially in Skyrim. 

If they added a scaling system, I think alot of my problems with it would be fixed. Something like how Dark Souls does it, in which your stats scale with how powerful your magic is, and even your elementary magic is powerful if you invest enough into whatever stat governs it. 

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.

[The Good Doctor]

4 minutes ago, Tdroid said:

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.

Perhaps if you know the game in and out so well that you can rush to find/buy all of the enchanted items you could ever need early on. Otherwise, you’re mostly just gonna be wading through piles of generic "X Damage" rings and "Open" amulets for the first half of the game. More high level and utility enchantments like Levitation, Slowfall, Jump, and fortifying specific skills and attributes aren’t guaranteed finds early on. Moreover, they are usually rather weak.

8 minutes ago, Tdroid said:

The headache of the menu I can grant you, but that applies to spells as well,

To a lesser extent, I feel. And you can fix this by crafting your own spells with names of your choosing and then deleting the ones with names you can’t remember. Doing this with enchanted items requires more resources and some points in the skill if you want it to actually be a decent item.

14 minutes ago, Tdroid said:

It's about 3 seconds

This is definitely an exaggeration. It’s barely longer than the cast time for adept level spells in Skyrim. Just a quick charge and then it’s off.

16 minutes ago, Tdroid said:

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 motherhumpers with a sack load of shiny rings and amulets.

Only if that random motherhumper has an intimate knowledge of the game and doesn’t mind dealing with a lot more annoyance than is necessary to be an effective spellcaster. Even then, I wouldn’t say it’s stacked heavily against them in the context of dealing with the threats of the game. If Morrowind had PvP, then yeah, it would matter, but because it doesn’t, it really isn’t as big a difference as you’re making it out to be. 

7 minutes ago, BigBossBalrog said:

I think alot of problems with Morrowind's magic system carry over to the other TES games. My personal problem with it is the lack of scaling, and how Magic is just really unviable on higher difficulties, and during the late game.  Right now it's way too static, especially in Skyrim. 

This is only true for Skyrim, to be honest. Magic is much more viable at high levels in both Morrowind and Oblivion thanks to spellmaking. 

[Tdroid]

23 minutes ago, The Good Doctor said:

A) Perhaps if you know the game in and out so well that you can rush to find/buy all of the enchanted items you could ever need early on. Otherwise, you’re mostly just gonna be wading through piles of generic "X Damage" rings and "Open" amulets for the first half of the game. More high level and utility enchantments like Levitation, Slowfall, Jump, and fortifying specific skills and attributes aren’t guaranteed finds early on. Moreover, they are usually rather weak.

 

B) This is definitely an exaggeration. It’s barely longer than the cast time for adept level spells in Skyrim. Just a quick charge and then it’s off.

C) Only if that random motherhumper has an intimate knowledge of the game and doesn’t mind dealing with a lot more annoyance than is necessary to be an effective spellcaster. Even then, I wouldn’t say it’s stacked heavily against them in the context of dealing with the threats of the game. If Morrowind had PvP, then yeah, it would matter, but because it doesn’t, it really isn’t as big a difference as you’re making it out to be. 

 

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.

23 minutes ago, The Good Doctor said:

This is only true for Skyrim, to be honest. Magic is much more viable at high levels in both Morrowind and Oblivion thanks to spellmaking. 

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.

Edited February 11, 2020 by Tdroid

[The Good Doctor]

8 minutes ago, Tdroid said:

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:

It’s very easy to to find and purchase basically any spell effect you desire very early in the game by going to the first Temple or Mages Guild you see. You have to get lucky or know where to look in order to find specific enchantments. There is no obvious location that is selling dozens of rings for every spell effect in the game, let alone decent variants of those spell effects.

13 minutes ago, Tdroid said:

I double checked and it was more like 2-2.5 seconds. Still about 2-2.5 seconds longer than enchantments.

Looks like less than 2 to me. Regardless, that casting time is negligible. Sure, you ain’t rapid firing or anything, but in a game that rarely throws more than two enemies at you at the same time, you also don’t really need to. I’d rather deal with a very short casting delay than carry around and constantly have to switch between 100 rings any day.

Or better yet, play like a mage with a brain and carry a more reasonable number of rings to complement your spell list.

16 minutes ago, Tdroid said:

Intimate knowledge in the form of

More like knowing where to look for something more specific than whatever "Ring of Hurting Bad Guys" most merchants are gonna be carrying. You aren’t going to find a cheap and decent levitation ring five seconds into Balmora, but the spell is exactly where you would expect it to be.

18 minutes ago, Tdroid said:

Works reasonably well in Skyrim too, if you keep Weakness poisons handy.

Poisons that require you to use a bow or melee weapon and have to be reapplied for every new foe. I love Skyrim, but it is the least reasonable game when it comes to destruction magic builds. Without poisons forcing you to do a melee/archer hybrid, the only late-game spells with half-decent damage are locked behind an easily-interruptible casting time that is actually debilitating.

[The Good Doctor]

Been going down memory lane a bit tonight. Reading some old posts.

@Celan This bit got me.  

Her instinct was to busy herself with the saddle, but instead she approached Carlotta.  Fidgeting with her axe handle, she said, "You made Boldir happier than I ever saw him.  That wasn't a long time, but I bet it's the happiest he's ever been.  If it wasn't for that, I'd be kicking his ass right now for leaving us."

Carlotta smiled at Rebec. She was usually good at fake smiles, but this one was not very convincing. It was hard to pretend to be in a good mood right now. Even for her, who had only known these two for a short time, this was a heavy moment. She may not have fought with them like Boldir, but she had grown to love them as family nonetheless. Looking at her husband, then back at Rebec, she said, "I'd have had to kick it myself if he'd tried."

Rebec returned Carlotta's smile, though her tears were beginning to show.  "Looks like Junior's between a seadog and a world of hurt.  I'd say he made the right choice to come out of it this well.  You got to take care of him, though.  Boy needs a bit of looking after.  I had to keep him from running off and...  Well, never mind about that."  Carlotta didn't need any more nightmares.
The admiral made to hug her new shield-sister-sort-of-in-law, then stopped, thinking it would be strange. Then she did it anyway

[TheCzarsHussar]

What's the context behind this?

[The Good Doctor]

1 minute ago, TheCzarsHussar said:

What's the context behind this?

The Red-Snows parting ways with Boldir’s family in Whiterun. This was before Riften and all the bad stuff that followed.

[TheCzarsHussar]

 

[The Good Doctor]

I've been busy today archiving the old forum threads (or doing what I hope is archiving. We'll know soon enough) and I stumbled across something I haven't seen in years. Balrog's first art commission. 

Baldur and Lorgar

I don't remember this part in the RP.  

[BigBossBalrog]

8 minutes ago, The Good Doctor said:

I've been busy today archiving the old forum threads (or doing what I hope is archiving. We'll know soon enough) and I stumbled across something I haven't seen in years. Balrog's first art commission. 

Baldur and Lorgar

I don't remember this part in the RP.  

Lorgar would be listening to crawling in my skin so loud he dosen't notice Baldur, while Baldur is too piss drunk to notice it's Lorgar in the bar drinking with him.

[The Good Doctor]

4 minutes ago, BigBossBalrog said:

Lorgar would be listening to crawling in my skin so loud he dosen't notice Baldur, while Baldur is too piss drink to notice it's Lorgar in the bar drinking with him.

Speaking of your characters, whatever happened to Dales' older brothers? Did she and Witch have them killed too?

Cause if so... fuck.

[BigBossBalrog]

4 minutes ago, The Good Doctor said:

Speaking of your characters, whatever happened to Dales' older brothers? Did she and Witch have them killed too?

Cause if so... fuck.

Yep. Dales killed "her" entire family branch

[BigBossBalrog]

As she called it "purification by blood and steel" for the Motierre's.

[The Good Doctor]

That's fucking brutal.

[BigBossBalrog]

Just now, The Good Doctor said:

That's fucking brutal.

People seem to forget how brutal she is to people she deems deserving of her wrath. She tortured that Justicar with a grin in Chapter 2. 

I mean most were rotten, some people need to die  But it was indeed still a brutal thing to do, enough she still has nightmares about it.

If you don't remember, Dale's "child" is actually her niece, who she decided to take in and pretend it was her and Witch's daughter.  And she was projecting enough of her brother onto her, she thought it was better to kill her for a split second, 

[The Good Doctor]

6 minutes ago, BigBossBalrog said:

If you don't remember, Dale's "child" is actually her niece, who she decided to take in and pretend it was her and Witch's daughter

I remember all of this, though I thought the child was a cousin or something. Forgot she was her brother's daughter. I'm guessing they were killed off-screen? I don't remember the deaths at all.

[BigBossBalrog]

1 minute ago, The Good Doctor said:

I remember all of this, though I thought the child was a cousin or something. Forgot she was her brother's daughter. I'm guessing they were killed off-screen? I don't remember the deaths at all.

I don't recall either. Must have been off screen then.