Now, one way to fix it is giving all mages custom spells based on their level and skills which would make mages actually a sight to behold (we are talking about mortals that can potentially travel across the planes, summon any sort of weird shit or bend the forces of nature).
That's pretty much a must-have. Besides, why should only the player be able to use custom spells and all the other, often centuries old wizards be stuck with shitty circinate ones?
My spellbook tends to be full of more debuffs than actual offensive spells, since crit from orcish barbarian combined with advanced combat leaves nothing but a pile of rotting magical turd.
There is also the fact that there aren't as many different things you can do with actual offensive spells - a bunch of point and AoE variants, some resistance piercers, a drain health based instakill or two, maybe some DoT and that's it.
OTOH with disablers and all sorts of creative hybrid spells the possibilities are endless.
Second - make projectiles move faster. Like really faster, so you can't avoid them as easily.
There is an exposed variable governing each magic effect's speed. No idea if it actually works and if it's used for leading the target as well.
Also: nerf restoration, it's too fucking powerful (even piss-poor punching bag as healer can be become a god for half a minute). Mostly by not allowing restoration to buff itself
And limit levitation.
Just my two cents, don't mind me.
Levitation could be limited in many ways, depending on how deep into mechanics we can reach.
You could make it dispel on action like invisibility, you could make the magnitude affect max clearance between character and ground (maybe integrate slowfall with levitation too), you could block actions when levitating. You could apply falling air control to movement while levitating. One thing I was incredibly butthurt about in Skyrim was that concentration spells would make a perfect way to reimplement levitation.
Restoration should lose all the fortify skill spells it didn't have prior to expansions (effects existed for use in items and the like but player couldn't access them), plus a lot of buffs should be moved over. If it doesn't restore something, it shouldn't be in restoration. Maybe move dispel and turn undead to restoration to compensate as they restore natural order in some way. In general spells could use some rearrangements. Resistance modifying spells should be moved from des/res to alt. Night eye and paralysis (maybe silence too) should be moved from ilu to alt.
The main problem I see here is that in the end Alteration could become the new master of all trades spell school and some schools could suffer from too much nerfing.
There really isn't any way to fix it. The enemy AI for casters has some fundamental hardcoded problems, such as that it will always cast the highest mana cost spell that it has regardless of the situation.
There is a lot of stuff you can script around. For example you could probably dynamically add or remove spells from AI caster's spellbook based on situation effectively allowing for selective enabling/disabling of spells. At the very least removal of spells ineffective against player's race should be doable.
Besides, I'm pretty certain there is some rudimentary situational casting AI in game - for example some enemies cast dispel on self, but only if debuffed.
Maybe with openMW some modder out there will go about revamping the AI and combat engine
And that's definitely a possibility since pretty much anyone able and willing can do that.
Weapon skills now affects damage dealt instead of hit chance. Both player and enemies have 100% hit chance.
I've always dreamt of a combat system where combatants' skills magically affected the weight and sharpness of their weapons rather than their ability to land blows on each other.
No, seriously.
why would you delay that?
