Oblivion:Gripes/Enchanting

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This article provides Enchanting gripes, as part of the Game Balance section of the Gripes article.

You can enchant your items to give you a 100% (or higher) Chameleon effect which effectively makes you invulnerable (NPCs won't retaliate). A solution to this would be to balance enchanting to prevent such a large effect from being possible or/and to improve the AI to allow NPCs to defend against a cloaked attacker (you don't really need to be able to see an attacker to swing wildly and hope for the best).

Or, don't do this since you're aware it's too powerful. Bethesda has always been about making games that offer FREEDOM, even if that freedom has the potential to break the game if recklessly abused. Limit yourself away from these overpowered strategies if you don't like them, don't ask the game makers to make it impossible so you won't be tempted to use it.

I might be alone on this one, but I personally enjoy working my way up from a nobody to an all powerful uber-character. It gives me a sense of accomplishment. If that's how I like to play is that really an 'abuse of freedom,' or is it just the role I choose to play? This isn't an attack on you, just a general comment on the whole freedom debate.

But it is hardly realistic, and destroys immersion, to artificially refrain from using any and all strategies that are available to you (would you in real life if your success or even survival depended on it?). Freedom in Oblivion is NOT unlimited so there is no reason why the chameleon strategy should not be balanced in the manner described by the original contributor, which actually sounds quite reasonable and realistic to me. Incidentally, my character has 100% sneak, and I balance this advantage by taking with me on my adventures a companion NPC with clumping steel boots and suicidal tendencies. Having to cope with the unpredictability that this causes continues to make the game challenging for me.

Would you, in real life, make a career of sneaking around stealing things? This is a role-playing game. The point of role-playing is to do things and be people you couldn't in real life. The point of such an open-ended game is to play however you want to shape it to your tastes. If you feel so bound that you can't choose what parts of the game to make off-limits to yourself, perhaps you shouldn't be playing. If immersion is thrown off a little, so be it. I'd rather have a little less immersion than be forced to play a game by someone else's rules.

This enchantment should probably be redone with the stacking in a multiplicative and not additive way: (100-50)%*(100-60)% = 20% visible or 80% chameleon, vs (50+60 = 110%) chameleon)

Great Idea. This way the effectiveness would approach 100% without actually getting there.

This mod caps Chameleon off at 65, works well.

Enchanting has been overly simplified, and while a degree of this is acceptable, even good, other parts are not so much. In particular, constant effect enchantments are difficult or impossible to tweak - most players find themselves unable to put two different effects on anything but a weapon.

That's because most players find themselves reading the instruction manual, which states (correctly) that you can't put multiple enchantments on clothing, armor, or jewelry. But this begs the question, "How did the vendors create multiple effect constant items ?".

The merchants presumably have more money and can therefore have more advanced mages to enchant the items; You are presumably not very advanced.

If the player wants to enchant equipment, he/she is forced to join the Mages Guild and gain entry to the Arcane University, just like in the case of spellmaking. Sigil stones may be used for powerful fixed enchantments, but the effort required to get the enchantment you need (without abusing quicksave) may be prohibitive.

This is again changed in the Frostcrag Spire purchased mod - any class of character now has access to spell making AND enchanting without the need to join the Mages guild, but the official plug-in isn't free.

MAGES GUILD... they have all the magic power... including enchanting and spellmaking

Enchanted items do not regenerate over time, or have any way to affect the charge wasted by one cast (enchant skill in Morrowind), making enchanted items that much less wonderful.

However, on the flipside, in Morrowind there weren't Varla stones that recharged all your items all the way all at once, and you couldn't pay people to recharge your items, either.

Regenerating enchanted weapons costs far too much, especially for lower level characters. I found myself spending upwards of 20k on my level 13-16 Sword of the Crusader, and I'm not going to make that much before I have used up the 69 charges it has. I hate to see how much it costs to recharge Umbra...

Which is why most players don't pay to recharge weapons and instead use soul gems and soul trapping. Paying is not the only option for how to recharge items, so if you choose to use the expensive option instead of cheaper options, it's not really fair to complain about how expensive it is.

Azura's Star is a grand soul gem available at level 2 or higher. With this and a simple soul trap spell, you shouldn't need to pay for recharging.

Why you're spending money on recharging the Crusader's Relics in particular is especially mystifying. Have you discovered your armor stand yet?

Disposition has no effect on the price of enchanted item recharges, thus making Speechcraft even more unnecessary.

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