Kab's Unleveled Spells

[Kab the Bird Ranger]

The new Skilled Spells

Introduction

Ever since I've started playing Daggerfall, and through developing my released magic mod, Skilled Spells, I've been thinking about how to "balance" magic a bit. In certain ways, it's extremely strong compared to the other options, but at the same time, spell points drain very quickly for a dedicated magic user, and can only be regenerated through resting, which is not available in all situations.

Since the release of Unskilled Spells, I've been working on new spell points costs for all the magic effects in the game. A spell in Daggerfall is a "bundle" of effects, and for each effect, up to three attributes can be involved: duration, chance, and magnitude (usually one or two). These attributes usually have a "base" value that remains constant and a "scaled" value, which scales with player level (ex: 2 rounds + 1 round per 1 level). For each effect, 3 cost values are assigned for each attribute: base, scale, and flat. Base cost is multiplied with the base value, scale cost is multiplied with the scale value divided by the "per level" value, and both of these are added to the flat cost (usually 0).

Ex: Climbing's Duration costs are 20, 20, and 0.
Given a Climbing effect of 5 rounds + 3 rounds per 2 levels:
5 * 20 + round_down(3/2) * 20 + 0 = 100 + 0*20 = 100 gold (about 20-25 spell points at 5 skills, I think?)

The actual formula is more complex (ex: this is modified by skill), but that's all we need for now. There's some issues with this approach. Even ignoring the outdated integer division issue, we see that Climbing's duration scale cost makes no sense. 1 round of Climbing costs as much as 1 round of Climbing per level. At level 1, both values are equal, and at every level after that, you always get more for the same cost by taking the scaling value instead of the base value.

And it's not even the worst. Many effects, like Jumping, Shield, Continuous Damage, Free Action, ... have scale costs that are cheaper than the base cost, and thus are better even at level 1. Even in the good cases, usually, by level 8, you're better off leaving the base value at 1 for all your spells, and only take scaling values.

In the current DFU, there's no way to make this really interesting, where balancing base and scaling values would make a good spell.

So, for this new mod, I got rid of scaling value entirely.

Unleveled Spells
"Unleveled" mods are popular in a certain part of the DFU community, and I'm not usually included in this, but I thought it would work for spells. It's not really surprising that later Elder Scrolls games got rid of scaling spells - it's only good at breaking the game. In 0.11.5, I added spell editing, and I've added lots of new spell formulas these past versions, and I think DFU is ready for a spell rebalance.

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Unlike Skilled Spells, this mod changes all the spells in the game. I've kept the names, effect types, target types, and elements, mostly. But all the values have been changed, almost all the effect costs have been changed, most spell icons (yes, they should be identifiable now), and even many spell descriptions (to reflect the actual effect, not the design intent...).

Changing spells is not so easy. Some spells are given to certain classes from the start, many are used in magic items, and most damaging spells are actually used by enemies too. Which means I had to set the values so that they'd be useful to a beginner mage shopping for starter spells, while still being good on magic items, while also ensuring low-level enemies don't one-shot you. For example, both imps and ancient liches cast Toxic Cloud. Without level scaling, you can't make both enemies cast the same spell: you'll either get an even worse Privateer's Hold, or you'll get tickled by endgame enemies. So I gave monster enemies unique spells that the player doesn't see in the spell shop (again, I tried to keep the elements and icons the same, to avoid surprises).

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So, with all the spells stripped of scaling, the spell effect costs rebalanced, icons changed, spell descriptions rewritten, and enemy spells reassigned, I think I got a working alpha build. It should take a while to test fully, but hey, I got through Privateer's Hold with just Destruction magic without getting destroyed by imps, so it's playable enough.

So here's a build for 0.12. I upgraded my Unity, and mods built with 2019.4.28f don't work with 0.11 (otherwise, the mod would work with 0.11.5 just fine).

All feedback welcome! Typos, bugs, balance, poor user experience, ugly UI, missing fun, thumbs up - send them my way.

[Kab the Bird Ranger]

Spells

In general, spells have the value they would have if you cast them at level 8 in classic. For Destruction spell, I tried to have a "progression", which was useful for assigning spells to class enemies. If you're looking to get started, here's the Destruction spell progression

- Frostbite (level 1)
- Shock (level 2, mage classes start with it)
- Wizard's Fire (level 5)
- Ice Bolt (level 8)
- Toxic Cloud (level 8)
- Lightning (level 11)
- Fireball (level 17)
- Ice Storm (level 17)

Frostbite is useful for non-casters looking to get started. The other spells I missed are probably balanced around level 8, I might change them later.

I've changed Free Action to cast Free Action instead of Cure Paralysis. Hopefully that works for enemies too.

For the full list, you can read my Github I guess: https://github.com/KABoissonneault/DFU- ... cords.json

Spell effects
I didn't change how any effect works, I only changed the costs. I removed all the scale values obviously, and I removed all the flat costs too. I tried to keep the base values the same, but some were just too high, to the point of making the spell useless, so I tried buffing some.

I also introduced a new cost formula. Many spell effects were just impossible to balance with a linear formula, so I took the formula from Oblivion, adapted for the Chance attribute in DFU:

Code: Select all

Factor * Duration * Pow(Chance%/100, 1.28) * Pow(MagnitudeAverage, 1.1)

If an attribute is not used by the effect, it's equivalent to 1.

Spells using this formula are usually spells that combine duration and magnitude in a multiplicative way (ex: continuous damage total damage = duration * magnitude). The reason is so spells like Continuous Damage or Regenerate don't scale to crazy power for too cheap of a cost. The exponent makes it cheaper to have a spell do 1 damage for 2 rounds than 2 damage for 1 round (since it's slower).

Other effects using this formula are those using only Chance. The default formula makes it so that casting a spell at 50% chance twice is the same cost as casting the spell at 100% chance... why would you bother doing that? With the new formula, casting the 50% chance spell twice is cheaper than the 100% chance one: you get a slight bonus for using a more unreliable spell.

Hopefully that makes sense!

Oh, also, before, spells were about 10 times more expensive with no magic skills than they would be at 100 skill level. Now, it should be 6 times more expensive, making spells cheaper for unskilled casters. Ideally, you shouldn't need to create a broken custom class to focus on fighting mostly and cast a few spells on the side.

Icons
Icons serve a few purposes: identifying what kind of buffs you have, identifying what you're getting hit by, and looking nice on the Hotkey Bar mod. For this mod, I tried to keep Fire spells red, Cold spells blue, Shock spells yellow, and Poison spells green. For the rest, I improvised, trying to make them more distinctive than classic. Tell me if you have better suggestions.

Enemy spells
In general, I tried to keep the same power on each enemy than classic. Imps have the same annoying toxic cloud (not the one I edited), orc shamans have the same fire spells as classic. I don't want to surprise people too much with power changes.

Spells most affected are non-damaging spells, like paralyze spells, silence spells, etc. In classic, a ghost has a 65% chance to paralyze you for 12 rounds, a whole real-life minute. Liches are even more ridiculous. Now, they have 35% chance to paralyze for 3 rounds. That's it. Even for spiders. I think people won't mind?

To ensure equality between players and class enemies (ex: mages, sorcerers, healers, ...), they all use the same spells you get from the shop. If they're too strong, so are they. Since the classic spells for class enemies made no sense, you'll see the biggest difference there. They mostly follow the Destruction spell order I posted above as you level.

Compatibility
This doesn't affect new spells added by mods. For example, on my end, I disabled Roleplay&Realism:Items's "Skill-based starting spells", since they still have with level scaling. I don't really need those anyway, the spells you get at the Mages Guild are usable at early levels now.

Extras
I've attached the spreadsheet I kept for balancing spell costs. Open it in LibreOffice Calc, and you should see two sheets, with the classic values, and the new values. The values that changed are highlighted in grey (mostly the ones that were removed).

[Jay_H]

Now this is sounding fun I'm wondering how this plays with SPELLS.STD. My ridiculous spells mod alters SPELLS.STD directly, and DFU normally reads from that. Are you making DFU read from a new spells source, or how will this interact with it?

[Kab the Bird Ranger]

My mod will overwrite the SPELLS.STD values directly, unless you used spell ids I didn't use. I changed all spells from 0 to 99, and added a few new ones after that.

This is a change I made to 0.11.5, it uses a new "SpellRecords.json", which works like "ItemTemplates.json". We're gonna have to synchronize the spell ids, using Hazel's list of reserved ids. For now, I just wanted to get this out

[emmathepony]

Am I reading this wrong or does your mod make spells even more powerful than they already are?

[Kab the Bird Ranger]

Given how ridiculous leveled spells can get late game, I can confidently say that at least at high levels, spells are much less potent. I don't want casters to struggle to beat late game enemies, just that they have to put some effort into it (like warriors and thieves), not just abuse the spellmaker.

Early, I'd say spells are indeed stronger. As I mentioned with effect costs, "base" costs were often way too high compared to "scaled" costs, so it was hard to get a good spell until you had a few character levels under your belt. Now, you can get some pretty decent spells from level 1.

It's still up for balance, I want feedback from people who've played it. Hopefully I didn't affect non-caster players too much (ex: by affecting magic item balance, or enemy spells balance).

[Kab the Bird Ranger]

One issue that I'm seeing so far is that the spell vendor doesn't actually charge you the gold cost of the spell, it charges you "spell cost times 4", which is about what the gold cost is if you have the vanilla formula and 0 skills. But with my new formula that makes spells cheaper to cast overall, that makes them cheaper to buy too. Most of them were like 60 gold each on my level 2 Mage.

I'm probably gonna replace the spell vendor UI to change this formula so that gold costs reflect the intent, at the risk of extra conflicts.

Spell vendor would still be cheaper than the spellmaker, since you can haggle for premade spells.

[Ralzar]

Mmmmm, more unleveled mods

I will get around to testing this later. How does the mod handle existing characters?

Early, I'd say spells are indeed stronger.

This I would consider a good thing as Daggetfalls spells are next to useless at low levels.

[Kab the Bird Ranger]

Mmmmm, more unleveled mods

I will get around to testing this later. How does the mod handle existing characters?

The spellbook is famously "resistant" to mod changes, nothing a mod can do about that. If you erase your entire spellbook and repurchase all the spells, it should be good. Magic items should be fine as is.

[darkedone02]

After trying this out without the skilled spells mod along with it, I do enjoy it... I even enjoy it more with the way enchanting works too. This make playing a pure mage along with the basic mana regen mod more fun to play. Problem however is the enemy resistance save throwing my spells.