oudeis on 20/5/2007 at 04:51
I have a level 41 Briton adventurer configured more or less in the ninja model- long blade, light armor, marksman, illusion, stealth, etc- and I'm actually going out of my way to make combat more difficult to keep things interesting. As my character is now, unless I deliberately risk myself in melee combat, say by equipping a short blade instead of my Glass longsword, or try to get clever with my magic skills, I can basically wipe out an entire room with little trouble. Even Dremora lords are really no problem for me as I just riddle them with spark arrows and finish with the glass longblade. I even ran my Hand-to-Hand from the low teens to 100 in a little over ten levels simply by beating all the creature mobs to death instead of using a weapon, and it's only a miscellaneous skill. I am seriously thinking about using the console to de-tune my character so the end game doesn't become a cakewalk and wanted to get your opinions.
Here's Runiel as he is now (all stats legitimately earned):
Str 75
Int 99
Will 78
Agi 93
Spd 75
End 70
Per 69
Luck 42
Sign- Ritual
Long Blade, Light Armor, Marksman, Hand-to-Hand are all at 100% or close to it. The various magic skills are in the mid-40s. I have the Dark Brotherhood light armor and I carry about 7 different weapons, most of them Short Blades, which is one of my miscellaneous skills and is currently in the upper 30s. I use a Glass longsword and a Steel longbow with Spark arrows as my 'oh-shit-I-need-to-kill-this-guy-fast' holdouts: If I use them as my primaries I can kill just about anything with little trouble. I had to put the poison and frost versions of the longblade in storage because they made things too easy.
Per my plan, I played at 76% difficutly until my LB, LA, and Marksman skills were at roughly 90% (somewhere in the late 20s/early 30s character level) then upped the difficulty to 100%. I had tried to start at 100% but it was just way too fucking hard. I also used the 'enableclassmenu' console command to change move those three skills to the Miscellaneous category and otherwise switched things around to make it more challenging.
I've explored almost all of southern Vvardenfell and the west coast up to Gnisis. I've hit just about every tomb, city, and ruin from Seyda Neen to Molag Mar/Tel Brannor and up to the Ghostfence. I haven't gone to the eastern side of Red Mountain/Sadrith Mora or north of the Red Mountain area, or taken the boat to Solstheim to hit the Bloodmoon content. Quest-wise, I've been having the Sixth House dreams and just found out that
I might be the Neverarine reincarnated, but have yet to do most of the the guild/faction/house quests.
Inline Image:
http://ohferfuxsake.org/files/Vvardenfell%20explored.JPGMy character has so many items for restoring health and stamina, buffing strength, summoning, etc, that inventory management and prioritizing which gear to loot is more of a problem than killing the mobs I got the stuff from. The bedroom in the Balmora mage guild has over 1 Million gold worth of ebony, glass, and Daedric weapons and armor laying on the floor, all legitimate drops. I don't use any of them because using a Daedric Dai-katana or Ebony Claymore against what I've faced so far is like pulling out a lightsaber in a fistfight. I still have almost 70k in gold after dropping close to 10 grand in bribes over the course of many levels, so I could easily buy a full set of Glass armor if I wanted and make combat even more of a stroll. Actually, one of the most powerful items I've got is the Boots of Blinding Speed. +200 to Speed makes strafing mobs to death child's play.
Now that you have more information than you probably needed or wanted, here are my questions: * First, did the game actually change the difficulty when I moved it up to 100%? I couldn't really see any difference, so I don't know if it can do it on the fly, as it were.
* What level were you when you beat the game/finished the main storyline quest, and what day were you on? I'm currently at day 144.
* Roughly how far along am I in the main quest, as a percentage?
* Is the game going to challenge me as I go further, i.e., will the mobs get tougher as I continue to progress, or will I have to debuff my character- diminish stats/skills/levels/gear- to keep things interesting? A melee with multiple opponents or a duel with someone in heavy armor and a two-handed weapon can still kill me, but everything else is pretty easy (I've already switched back to silver arrows and changed my glass boots and shield back to the DB boots and Veloth's Shield).
* What mods should I look at if I want to make the world a more dangerous place? Right now all the ones I've got are graphical- Vibrant Morrowind and the like. I looked through the ones listed on Gamepsot and a lot on Planetmorrowind but most of them were either weird (Better Bodies and the like) or a little too much in the Classical Fantasy mode (dragons and other standard creatures). I'd like to stay within the world Bethesda created if at all possible.
As always, thanks.
cyrano on 21/5/2007 at 04:36
I haven’t played Morrowind for its sake in about three years, but your experience is pretty much the same as most people’s. It doesn’t really matter what character you start with, they all evolve into a stealthy battlemage at some point, and there are few challenges if you use the resources that the game provides. Here are my answers to your questions:
In my experience, the difficulty slider does work, but you may be past the point where it can compensate for the strength of your character. I started a game with it at 100% and routinely had my ass handed to me by every rat and kwama forager that I met. I decided on a progression of 10% with each level up so I would be at 100% at tenth level. That was alright, but I did not have the sense of improving compared to my opponents, so I settled on 5% increase per level and that I liked.
I can’t say what is normal and elapsed time and level for completing the main quest, but I expect my experience is not. My character is forty-something and I had been playing for over one thousand game days, and I still haven’t completed the main quest (but I’m close). Unlike you, I spent my time advancing in factions and part of that time has been spent in Mournhold and Solsthein (I haven’t completed their main quests either).
You are about a third of the way through the main quest.
No. For your character the rest of the main quest will pose little challenge to you unless you continue to hobble your character. Like you are contemplating, I intentionally held my player back in his development. I limited gold and training. I would not use any enchantments, but I did use restoration potions, intervention scrolls and illusion and alteration spells. Bound weapon spells were forbidden–they are completely unbalanced. You think your ninja with a steel longbow is a terror now, wait until you see what he can do with a Daedric longbow and a +10 bump to his marksman skill. It sort of backfired when I used underdeveloped weapon skills. That just meant that my attributes increased faster due to the extra skill increases. I suppose that you are using Bethesda’s leveling system. I used an alternative that results in attributes increasing at a lower rate for most play. My mod was rather primitive since is did not account for the effect of enchantments, but that was not a problem for me since I did not use enchantments. Since I stopped playing, another leveling mod has been released that manages advancement similar (in concept at least) as my mod. You might to look into (
http://uk.geocities.com/galsiah/) Galsiah's Character Development. Since it can be applied retroactively to your existing game, you could benefit from its changes with your current character. When I play again, I will use it (perhaps slightly modified).
There are many mods that increase the realism of the world, but not so much the difficulty level. My favorite listing for such mods is (
http://www.mwmythicmods.com/realism.htm) Empirical Morrowind. If you do not object to running a third party program along side Morrowind, Check out Horatio’s
NPC Enhanced. It makes enemy behavior more realistic and consequently more challenging. Do not expect to clear out a bandit cave piecemeal. One enemy will warn the others and they will swarm you.
Wakim’s Game Improvements addresses a range of gameplay issues, it changes the rate at which skills improve–not to make it more difficult, but to make it (in someone’s opinion) more realistic. Of course, you can tweak the game settings yourself if you want to make leveling slower. Economy mods might make it more difficult to accumulate wealth, but that is a two-edged sword. If you change the value of items it affects buying as well as selling. There are ‘creature’ mods that add different (and presumably more challenging) creatures to the game. I haven’t used any, but I like what I hear about PirateLord’s
Creatures. Of course, they will not alter the difficulty of the main quest. As I write this I am reminded of a recent release that dramatically toughens the final confrontation. Check out Darknut’s (
http://www.tessource.net/files/file.php?id=10845) Dagoth Ur.
oudeis on 21/5/2007 at 23:23
You ROCK! Thanks for the quick, in-depth, and very helpful post.
