Wisdom

[Ommamar]

So according to the UESP, which has become suspect in my opinion, it states Wisdom governs spell resistance and allows for the magical skills to advance faster. I could of swore I saw code somewhere that indicated it lowered cost of a spell and was part of the formula to decide on a spells effectiveness. For example if a spell had a chance to hit or effect the target in a range then a higher wisdom would put you closer to the high end of that range. Any information provided to help my understanding is appreciated.

[Teralitha]

Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

[Ommamar]

Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

Not helpful!

[Teralitha]

If no one seems to know the answer, youll have to experiment. Make a character with low wisdom and at least one spell school, and another character with high wisdom and at least one spell school. Then look in your spellbook and see what the magic casting cost is for your starter spells and compare. If they are significantly different then you know.

[Interkarma]

There is no Wisdom attribute in Daggerfall. Do you mean Willpower?

Willpower is used to increase your magic resistance at the rate of 1 point of resistance for every 10 points of Willpower. It's not a huge benefit, but I guess every bit counts.

[Teralitha]

There is no Wisdom attribute in Daggerfall. Do you mean Willpower?

Willpower is used to increase your magic resistance at the rate of 1 point of resistance for every 10 points of Willpower. It's not a huge benefit, but I guess every bit counts.

It has no other effect?

[Interkarma]

Apart from managing it and all the effects related to it, the only place Willpower is actually used in the game in a small amount of magic resistance.

The in-game popup description for Willpower states that it governs the "ease of increasing Willpower-related skills" - but again Allofich has reverse engineered very specific code from classic here. Each skill use has a tally counter and a per-skill advancement multiplier. There's no sign of attributes being used to govern skill increases.

There's often a difference in what Daggerfall says it's doing and what's it's actually doing under the hood. I can only imagine certain things changed during development and the in-game text was never updated. Unfortunately none of us have the source code from classic to compare. The best we have is the reverse engineering work done using DOSBox debugger, decompilers, etc. to look at the assembly code execution and derive what's happening in these formulas. That's the best I've got for now, I'm sorry.

[mikeprichard]

Another fix made to the UESP Attributes page based on this excellent factual reverse-engineering info.

[Interkarma]

I'd love to say with perfect confidence that classic Daggerfall works the same way, but I didn't do this reverse engineering work. I can only say that I trust the person who did. It would be great to get Allofich/R.D.'s feedback on this, but he hasn't been around for some time. I believe he's busy with other projects (he contributes his unique skillset to more than just DFU).

This whole endeavour would have been easier with original source code. I would probably have a few less wrinkles than I do now.

[Ommamar]

Yes Willpower was what I was referring to. It is good information to know thank you interkarma I will have to rethink builds as things don't appear to have the effects I was thinking that they did. Magic resist is nice to have but at most you can get +10 through attributes. Which is not much when you consider what you can achieve through spells and item enhancements.