Morrowind mods are a fucking jungle

[Sceptic]

You don't really *need* mods, just official patches and MCP.

And Patch Project or whatever it's called now.

Also, I vote for a moratorium on BB.

 

[Mangoose]

OMG BB sounds like sex. What's the current status on that?

 

[SCO]

finished. slightly unrealistic boobs.

 

[Mangoose]

Are Figgerty's stuff in general good (like the mods that he is compiling to make BB)?

 

[Heresiarch]

Ive installed this game a billion times, spending hours and hours finding and installing mods, only to uninstall by the time I leave Balmora. I love exploration games, with Gothic I and II being the best examples Ive played, but I cant get into this one. So the last time I installed, I said fuck it Im keeping the mods to a minimum, and this is what I settled on:

- All of the official mods (AreaEffectArrows, LeFemmArmor, etc)
- Last official patch and the Unofficial patch
- Better Bodies, Heads, Clothes
- Morrowind Code Patch
- Where are all the birds going
- NPC LVC Locks (the one where shopkeepers lock their doors at night)
- Service Requirments
- Better Beasts (and some neck fix)
- Weathered Signs
- Skip Tutorial

Thats what I have installed. Not that I ever play the game anyways, but if the urge is there, I try it every now and again

Same here. Morrowind, for me, is like 30% looking for mods, 30% testing out the mods, 20% hiking around and listening to the music and looking at the scenes, and 20% for actual gameplay.

I especially liked some of the sexy dark elf bikini armor complete with beautiful anime character faces and hair. I often let my beauty go swimming naked at a lake while taking screenshots. Dark elf ladies don't have body hair which makes it even more attractive.

 

[SCO]

Are Figgerty's stuff in general good (like the mods that he is compiling to make BB)?

Edit: I don't understand what you meant by BB if you think it is Figgerty doing it. BB stands for Better Bodies. The mod i linked has nothing to do with that, it is planned compilation of some resource intensive mods, for performance (some of which i talk bellow)

Yeah, but not all. His utility and ambient mods are fine. Things like the keyring (fucking keys) and Protective guards, Fleeing fletchers and that other one that makes enemies follow you (not by him). Better telekinesis is probably cheating (it is real telekinesis - problem: you can be in stealth mod out of the view of npc and steal things with it). The rest of them, like the quests i haven't tried. I generally dislike mods that require me to bind a key and he has some.

Beware. Use the exe optimizer (well, just follow the list, the code patch helps too), since without it MWSE mods are crash prone.

BTW i updated the tutorial, i was mistaken about some MGE things (i don't use it).

 

[Mangoose]

Edit: I don't understand what you meant by BB if you think it is Figgerty doing it. BB stands for Better Bodies./quote]

Figgerty's "WIP Better Battles"

But thanks on the rest.

 

[DraQ]

I especially liked some of the sexy dark elf bikini armor complete with beautiful anime character faces and hair.

.
.
.
Oh.

?
AMIRITE?

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Can someone explain to me why do they like Better Heads?

People end up looking like Barbie / Ken dolls, which is even worse than the polygon orgy that is the original bodies and heads (which you stop noticing after16 minutes and 23 seconds of game time). The "claw"-like position of the hands (pictured above) also look funny. I have some good animation replacers and most movement is still kinda unnatural. With the default animations, then...The realistic looking faces on the stiff bodies makes the gameworld look like a nightmare, full of walking corpses who insist on pushing walls of text at you.

^looks fugly, but I don't mind it anymore

 

[DraQ]

Can someone explain to me why do they like Better Heads?

No, I don't get it either. Better bodies I can, but they could still conform to the originals better, but not better heads.

 

[VentilatorOfDoom]

I have to keep up with the times. With Skyrim coming and stuff, I bought Morrowind & Oblivion enhanced editions (with expansions and even DLC included) for cheap. I plan to actually play them soon. Morrowind first. So is it true that I only need galsiahs character development mod (as said on page 1), and secondly why do I need this mod? In what way does Morrowind character development suck so that it requires a mod to fix it? Thanks in advance. Also, I want to play as a wizard, suggestions?

 

[Clockwork Knight]

It sucks the same way Oblivion's does - raise-by-using skill system that incentives you to, for example, spam shitty, low cost spells to train them, or select your favorite skills as Miscellaneous so they'll level up slowly, just so you can get those coveted +5 bonuses on level up (which will be useless by the time you reach level 6 as the games aren't difficult at all)

I can live with it since I'm not a neurotic fag that MUST receive +5 on every attribute per level, but it's still a little annoying that I have to spam some things if I want to learn them in a reasonable time span.

You can use Galsiah, MADD Leveler (preferred by some as it isn't as intrusive as GCD - the level-up screen still exists, editing the plugin won't bork it), or BTB's Game Improvements (built upon Wakim's Game Improvements).

I use BTB's as I like the solution (the whole mod, tbh - he turned The Steed into a good birthsign, ffs). If you have the patience, see this part of the readme that explains the level-up changes (the guy is funny so reading it all isn't as boring as it looks like)

Skill progression itself has also been slowed down some, with regards to major, minor, and misc skills. Major skills have been slowed to the previous growth speed of minor skills, and minor skills to the previous speed of misc skills. Misc skills, on the other hand, have been slowed completely to a stop, thus forcing you to rely on skill books and paid training to raise them. The first two changes are mostly to slow level-ups down a bit by keeping your major and minor skills from rocketing totally out of control, but that last change is the big one. And by "big one", I mean it's probably controversial enough to get me tarred and feathered by angry (and surprisingly violent) Morrowind fanatics.

I can argue at great length about why a natural misc skill growth embargo is an excellent idea for both balance and gameplay, but I'll do my best to avoid writing a novel here and summarize the major points. First, and most importantly, it addresses the fact that the game levels along with your character (and thus with your major and minor skills), whereas your misc skills can be raised to the same ultimate maximum value without the conseqeunce of the game becoming more difficult as a result. It's a common behavior of less scrupulous players to choose skills they have no intentions of ever using as majors and minors so that this fatal flaw in the game's design can be exploited to great effect.

Secondly, and somewhat related to the first point, is that it forces you to play the game the way that it's actually meant to be played. The single most common complaint that I'm sure I'll hear about this change is that players want to gain experience from their actions, which is the exact reason that your selection of major and minor skills is supposed to be a reflection of how you intend to play the game. But players instead do the exact opposite of what the game intends by tailoring their playing styles towards manipulating the system. They select major and minor skills based solely on how easy they are to raise and misc skills based on what attributes they want to have maxed out by level 5. At no point is the question, "will I ever fucking use this?" ever asked, because the player at that point is far more concerned with how in the hell he's going to micro-manage attribute multipliers from 27 different skills, only 10 of which control the level-up that all 27 of them are contributing to.

Removing the natural experience gain for misc skills allows you to assume much greater control over how your character develops, as you no longer have to worry about "wasting" attribute multipliers from misc skill gains and are free to play as you wish. This holds especially true for the first level, which was previously pratically guaranteed a 5x multiplier for both personality and speed due to the rapid early growth of athletics and mercantile (both very likely to be set as misc skills for characters from races not particularly known for their speed or charm), thus leading to a great deal of obsessive behavior regarding not using any skill that might waste any precious attribute multipliers. And if that sounds like fun to you, then I hope you're reading this from inside a room with lots of padding on the walls.

This brings us to my third and final major point, which is that this change adds a much greater sense of legitimacy to several aspects of the game in which is was previously lacking. I don't imagine, for example, that anybody has ever deliberately selected athletics as a major skill for any reason other than cheap level-ups. But now, it makes a good choice as such because maxing it out as a misc skill is no longer the given it once was. One, training costs money - lots of it. Two, the additional layer of difficulty due to the attribute requirements for training could be the basis of another discussion in its own right. Three, and be honest, when's the last time you actually paid for athletics training?

An argument could be made that I'm merely replacing skill grinding with cash grinding, which is sort of a valid point. Personally, I see the decision of which misc skills to invest my hard-earned cash on raising as an extension - if not an evolution - of a system where you have some degree of control of how your character grows. Whether a character grinds for cash to pay for misc skills or pays for misc skills because he has some cash that he wants to spend is a bit of a chicken-or-the-egg argument, and perhaps irrelevant. But consider "grinding" for cash to pay for training when my mod (along with HotFusion's) removes every "cheap" way of earning money versus the "grinding" one would otherwise engage in to raise those misc skills the natural way. Which really feels like more of a grind to you?

The commonly-held view among the Morrowind community is that merely slowing the growth of miscellaneous skills will still have all of the positive effects discussed above while still allowing players to get that warm, fuzzy feeling of accomplishment, no matter how meaningless, whenever they use skills that they should never be competent with in the first place. Some make the mistake of applying real-world logic to the problem by claiming that it only makes sense that characters should get better at their skills with practice. By that logic, people should be capable of mastering any skill - even ones for which they lack any sort of natural talent - through repetition alone and without the outside help of such bullshit as education or training. But if anything, most of us still suck at what we do even with those things, and I've yet to see a single result from all my years of practicing having a vagina.

But what really grinds my gears more than anything isn't the faulty logic involved - at least not the aforementioned faulty logic - it's the illusion that slowing down skill growth makes raising the skills in question more challenging. And just so we're clear, this next sentence is getting its own paragraph:

Time-consuming =/= harder

Period. Exclamation mark, even. This one factoid alone is essentially the entire thesis of my changes here, if not that of my entire mod. To assume that most players don't want to waste days of their lives for miniscule skill gains is to assume that most players actually have lives. My mod is aimed - very specifically - at those of us who clearly don't. Simply put, the one fact that everybody can agree on is that miscellaneous skills must have some drawback to balance them against major and minor skills other than the fact that they're a bigger waste of time than majors and minors are, otherwise Morrowind just boils down to nothing more than a big waste of time. And I'm sure that's not what any of us want.

But even with this detailed argument that will only continue to get stronger as I'm further challenged to explore and defend the merits of my ideas, I'm aware that most people will still disagree with me and will hate my rotten guts if I force them to play my personal vision of how Morrowind was actually meant to me. So, I've begrudgingly included an alternate "Settings" plugin in the "extra stuff" folder that omits my changes to major, minor, and miscellaneous skill growth. I hope you choke on it.

The skill multiplier settings have been adjusted to make it a bit easier to earn 3x and 4x attribute gains on level up. With the previous settings, you were stuck with a 2x gain unless you put a serious amount of effort (5 levels) into raising related skills, whereas the requirements for a 4x gain were so close to achieving 5x that there was often no point in not just pushing on for it. The new settings now reflect a linear progression rate: 1 level for a 2x stat gain, 4 levels for a 3x gain, 7 levels for 4x, and 10 levels for 5x. The fact that these benchmarks are identical to the ones in the 3D Might & Magic games is purely a coincidence, and has nothing to do with my undying love of the M&M series. Really.

My dark elf assassin is doing well. Instead of buying a shitty spell and spamming it while I bunnyhop across the countryside, I have to save money for when I find a trainer. I'm also using Service Requirements (found on the site), which means the mages guild refuses to provide me with training / spellmaking / spells until I'm of a suitable rank.

Like Wakim's, BTB"s GI is modular so you can skip the things you don't like. By the way, the list on his site is pretty good (mostly because he tries to make it conflict-free, editing plugins if necessary).

Although sorting the load order isn't that hard if you don't use many mods, mlox will auto-sort them for you.

 

[DraQ]

BTB's Game Improvements

Upon reading the readme I have some problems with that mod.

Now, many ideas are awesome, like nerfing glass armour's durability, or alchemy tweaks, or giving NPCs their own list of often powerful spells. HOWEVER, some ideas are just derp, for instance, if you consider Drain Health a cheaper, cheat-ish damage health, you shouldn't remove it from enchanting, just raise the effect's cost to that of damage health or above if you have made all premade spells not autocalculated anyway. Why? Because the other approach reeks of bethesda and happens to break my gameplay as drain health happens to have interesting quirks that make it vastly preferable to Damage Health in some circumstances.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

"Interesting quirks", you say. Would some of these happen to be crafty insta-gib, low-cost nukes?

But seriously, at least he explains that it was the best thing he could think of to make it fair, instead of making it seem like he's doing you a divine favour (like Bethesda).

The drain health/fatigue/magicka/attribute spells are also very good examples of whoever having made them clearly not being aware of how they actually work, given that both the spells and effect costs appear to suggest that the magnitude is cumulative over time. And as I'm sure we're all aware by now, it isn't. In order for drain fatigue or magicka to be of any use at all, I had to raise the spell magnitudes drastically and tank the effect costs. So I did.

Drain health, however, was actually already quite useful - too useful, in fact. What made it unique amongst the drain effects is that it was the only one that could be truly effective at a duration of one (as a sufficient magnitude would still prove lethal), thus allowing very effective custom creations that cost next to nothing to cast - especially if the effect cost was set to match its intended use. There was nothing I could do to make drain health anything other than a cheaper, always-preferable alternative to damage health, so I edited the pre-made spells to reflect how the effect is supposed to work and then barred it from custom spells and enchantments. I went ahead and lowered the effect cost, as well, so that it would work as originally intended in potions.

[...]

• Drain health, as discussed above, basically just becomes a cheaper version of damage health when it gets used in any kind of a custom build, and it becomes downright evil if the effect cost is lowered to reflect its actual purpose. In addition to removal of spellmaking/enchanting privileges, the effect cost has been lowered so that it will function as intended in potions.

 

[DraQ]

"Interesting quirks", you say. Would some of these happen to be crafty insta-gib, low-cost nukes?

Crafty and insta-gib? Yes. Nukes? Possibly. Low-cost? I don't care.
Low cost is an advantage if you're making a pest-killer, but, while drain health is a low cost effect, it isn't drastically lower than fire or frost damage (base cost 4 vs 5), and, unlike all damaging effects it doesn't benefit from repeated or prolonged application, which, along with the fact that 1s of spell has it's cost doubled, not only caps the damage that can be inflicted with it, but also makes the actual spell less efficient than even 2s fireball inflicting the exact same amount of damage.
The main allure of drain health is that the effect is truly instantaneous, which makes it the only existing spell with actual potential for stealth kills. It's balanced by the drawback that if enemy health is even by 1HP higher than the damage inflicted, the spell has no effect whatsoever.

In any case, the proper method of dealing with drain health being a cheap version of damage health isn't removing it from spellmaking, it's making it more expensive. If you're making almost all purchasable spells not autocalculated, and give the enemies their own list of autocalculated ones you have no excuse - it's not like there is much point to enemies casting drain over time spells on player (if only because the AI fails at applying subtler spells properly) anyway.

But seriously, at least he explains that it was the best thing he could think of to make it fair, instead of making it seem like he's doing you a divine favour (like Bethesda).

Bethesda also "explains" - that Mystycism was pointless anyway, that no one used spears, that the lack of crossbows would be compensated by ohsoawesome archery and so on. Fuck this shit.

Some of the fixes are brilliant, what the guy did to alchemy actually reminds me of some of the stuff I planned to do eventually, but about the half of magic fixes are fucking derp, bethesda and break much more than they actually fix.

And wasn't drain intelligence glitch repaired by MCP? I want my fucking drain agility!

 

[VentilatorOfDoom]

Thanks for the info CK. What happens if I don't grind skills for +5 modifiers? Will my character suck? Or does the game remain perfectly playable in which case I won't bother with mods for a first playthru anyway...

 

[DraQ]

Thanks for the info CK. What happens if I don't grind skills for +5 modifiers? Will my character suck? Or does the game remain perfectly playable in which case I won't bother with mods for a first playthru anyway...

Eh, don't bother with multipliers. They are nice when they occur, but if you specifically grind for them you can kiss your chances of ever getting laid goodbye. Eventually, all Morrowind characters approach godhood.
The system verges on falling apart under its own weight, and the worst thing you can do is to actively seek means to exploit it or artificially accelerate your character's growth. Morrowind is powergamer's hell - powergaming is so easy it brings no satisfaction and the game retaliates by becoming cheesy and unchallenging. Simply forget about level up mechanics and only let it remind you of itself when you level up.

 

[dr. one]

Thanks for the info CK. What happens if I don't grind skills for +5 modifiers? Will my character suck? Or does the game remain perfectly playable in which case I won't bother with mods for a first playthru anyway...

you might also consider Linora's Leveling Mod (the hard version) which provides, at least in my experience, balanced results. though i´ve played with Wakim´s as well.
BTB´s Improvements is a nazi mod.

 

[DraQ]

Thanks for the info CK. What happens if I don't grind skills for +5 modifiers? Will my character suck? Or does the game remain perfectly playable in which case I won't bother with mods for a first playthru anyway...

you might also consider Linora's Leveling Mod (the hard version) which provides, at least in my experience, balanced results. though i´ve played with Wakim´s as well.
BTB´s Improvements is a nazi mod.

I'm considering installing some parts of it, but certainly not the magic one.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

BTB´s Improvements is a nazi mod.

Yeah, the author mentions more than once that lots of people disagree with his nazi way of doing things. Lucky for me, I didn't find anything to whine about so I use all the plugins.

grawr

Since it's modular, if you find the spell changes to be derp, just don't use the "Spells" .esp. Some of the more nazi changes in the "Settings" plugin (like enchanting changes) are absent from the "Settings - Alternate" .esp.

Thanks for the info CK. What happens if I don't grind skills for +5 modifiers? Will my character suck? Or does the game remain perfectly playable in which case I won't bother with mods for a first playthru anyway...

Perfectly playable. Morrowind isn't the most balanced of games, and in a few levels you can take care of whatever weak points your character may have, either by spells or by equipment. The "sucking" refers to how you have the constant reminder that if you use a skill, you may be leveling a stat you don't care about.

It's only a problem in vanilla Oblivion, since enemies level with you - so yes, your character will suck if you don't grind (unless you are playing a pure fighter / mage, which do well since they'll probably get the +5 for their most important attributes anyway). For Oblibions, you'll want Oblivion XP or Simple Leveling mod, which I just found out was based on Linora's.

Now that I think about it, since you're playing Lollowind for the first time you'll want to avoid BTB's GI - it changes so many things it makes consulting other people / sites a chore. I didn't know about Linora's, but it seems a great choice as it seems to be the one that changes the least things about the game (i.e., you can still enjoy your low-cost, undetectable nukes

)

 

[Helton]

Simply forget about level up mechanics and only let it remind you of itself when you level up.

Or use GCD and forget about it forever.

 

[Eyeball]

The game is not difficult. Leave your autistic powergaming fetish by the wayside and just play the game without worrying about having to game the system to become ultraleet.

 

[DraQ]

grawr

Since it's modular, if you find the spell changes to be derp, just don't use the "Spells" .esp.

It's a shame, really, since a good part of the spell plugin seems , the problem is that the rest of the plugin is .

I wouldn't protest if he raised the cost of drain health dramatically, but removing it from self-made enchantments and spells is idiotic, because the cheese could be just as easily removed by raising the base cost to or above Damage Health.
OTOH does the mod even try rectifying Absorb Health cheese?

 

[Clockwork Knight]

If you are referring to being able to spam Absorb Health on anyone with impunity, apparently not since the code patch already takes care of it.

Reflected Spells Fix

When "absorb" spell effects are reflected normally, they end up cancelling themselves out due to the caster and the target being one and the same. Whether or not this was intentional or merely shitty programming is anybody's guess, but I think it's safe to say that you'll be a lot more careful lobbing them around when your enemies can pull a Soviet Russia on your ass and absorb from YOU. The fix works the other way around, too, so you can also be Soviet Russia if you want. Though, if YOU are Soviet Russia, then what does Soviet Russia do to... oh, fuck, my head just exploded.

About Absorb Health as a whole, the effect itself had its base cost changed.

Absorb Health 15.00 (instead of 8.00)

Drain Health had it's base cost changed, too.

*Drain health base cost has been lowered from 4.00 to 0.40 to balance alchemy effects

And some additional info.

[...] Black Hands Dagger deserve very special mentions. The latter can possibly be attributed to the fact that whoever made it just didn't understand how the absorb health effect works, because we've already established that at least somebody involved with the game design (probably the same dude, actually) had no clue how any of the drain effects work, either. [...]

 

[DraQ]

*Drain health base cost has been lowered from 4.00 to 0.40 to balance alchemy effects

Derp. Should be incresed to 8 or whatever guy considers appropriate, and replaced by damage health or whatever in potions.

Nah, I'm sticking with WGI, if only because this guy here pretty much castrates spellcraft and enchanting in game by removing about 50% of fucking legitimate gameplay as collateral damage while cheesehunting. And what's his problem with TK? This spell is meant for remote manipulation, including theft and can be easily adjusted in terms of viability by changing it's cost as it isn't actually usable by NPCs or creatures.