"When you're trying to balance something, it's better to make it too powerful than too useless. Then people will use it, and you can reduce its power until it's balanced." -- David Sirlin (paraphrased)
The Ridiculous Spells Mod!
TO INSTALL: Extract the SPELLS.STD file to your base Daggerfall data, in the arena2 folder. It will replace a SPELLS.STD file you already have in there. You may want to make a copy of the old file before replacing it.
TO UNINSTALL: Delete the new SPELLS.STD file and put the old one in its place. The DaggerfallGameFiles folder has an original included.
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This mod edits the game's circinate spells, which Daggerfall Unity draws from, to create entirely new ones. I decided to replace and remove many of the old spells that nobody uses, and combined effects to create others. I had some fun working this out, like creating a "Spirit Scout" spell that provides Invisibility and Tongues. Imagine running through a dungeon invisible, pacifying all the enemies before you explore it for real! It's just one of the many new creations available with this mod.
I did my best to lower magicka costs wherever I could, since I don't want these spells to be unreachable.
One of my limitations is that these spells are also forcibly linked to the magic items they belong to. Therefore, I couldn't alter the Toxic Cloud spell too much since the same Toxic Cloud spell will show up in any "Toxic Cloud" magic item. However, I did change the values for every single spell in the game. Because these spells can be used from magic items, some of them have very powerful effects and exorbitant magicka costs.
Some spells, like Disintegrate and Dispel Undead, are gone for good. You can still make them in the Spellmaker, but they're too dangerous for ordinary gameplay; if you Disintegrate an enemy carrying a quest item, I don't know that you can ever get it back. That's a big problem! So I replaced them.
A little bonus: Spiders will paralyze you for much less time when they hit. Hooray!
Playtesting requested! Let me know about the bugs and really unbalanced stuff so I can fine-tune it. As I'm posting this I'm realizing this is probably going to make mage enemies insanely powerful. We'll have to see!
Also I don't know how to properly choose the spell icon from within DFSpell ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ If anyone figures that out let me know.
