Some problems with Morrowind

[Sniffles]

First, thanks much to team Emma. Your follower following code is a vast improvement over the original game. The original game was a trainer in making you walk the PC backwards to keep track of the lunatic behind you.

Now if Emma and Co. could address another complete putz built into the game.

The scenario. An unarmored PC with excellent unarmored rating is trying to back up a slope with a werewoof right below her. She is only trained in and armed with a bow. I note she is hitting the monster, but not doing any damage. It turns back into a human and using it's fists isn't making a dent in the PC. The problem is the PC is running out of arrows.And finally runs out. But she's stuck up against a rock, the former woof swinging away at her. Think FOREVER.

Problem 1, The best bow in the game, Daedric has been found and is employed. Doing some checking, this is probably the only Daedric bow in the game. The only bow worth beans against higher level enemies. ONE WEAPON for archers. Melee fighters get a choice of about 300 that do equal or greater damage.
Problem 2. Having fired about 50 arrows at the woof and taking a few hits, the 1000 health of the bow is below 100. Below 100 with a Daedric bow does the same amount of damage as my soup ladle. And of course, it can't be repaired in combat.

Bethseda: Screw You, archers. It's a hack and slash melee game, and all about fixing your weapon every time you take damage jumping off too high a hill. A regular long bow breaks after about 40-50 shots and the average PC that only has long bows available takes 3 to 5 shots to take down a cliff racer. AND SO said PC needs to pack about 50 pounds of repair hammers to make the jaunt from Seyda Neen to Ald Velothi. No exageration.

Problem 3. Leveling up the PC a little, quite normally, her damage done by a bow never increased. NEVER. AT ALL. I finally checked in the wiki. Bow damage is in direct proportion to STRENGTH. WTF? Being an unarmored build PC I of course never bothered giving her any strength.
I turned my witch loose on the game. Begged her. In three days she used the wiki, abused the H out of potions and the PC was packing a Daedric Tower Shield that beefed strength up 89 points. And dropped her armor rating about half that. Now she, a level 9 character has almost the wap wap capability as the snot nosed hack and slash builder at level 2., though her armor rating is H for hopeless. For a speed-personality-agility build, she's a wreck. Useless.

BUT, I got to thinking. A mod. A pretty simple mod. Reduce the degradation of weapons to a reasonable level. Say you can fire 250 arrows without the bow turning into a limp noodle. And just move the damage from Strength to Agility where it belongs.

[jgf]

The hitting power of an archer is a function of their marksman skill, the power of the bow, and the power of the arrows. So even a daedric bow is not doing the max damage it could if only equipped with iron or steel arrows, but use glass, ebony, daedric, or enchanted arrows and the damage mounts quickly. And werewolves are among the higher level opponents, if your character is below lvl 20 expect a vicious fight. Also, and there is some debate on this, marksman weapons do not seem to work as well if you are within melee range of your opponent.

The health of weapons and armor, and the degree of degradation with use, is easily edited in the CS, but is also affected by the marksman skill; so a bow will degrade more rapidly for a lvl 20 marksman than for a lvl 50.

Weapon damage in Morrowind is not stated directly, instead a range is given; character lvl and skill lvl determine the damage within that range. Since Morrowind enchantments work differently than Oblivion, as soon as you can get a grand soul (from golden saint or ascended sleeper, though I think there are a couple such gems laying around in the game) enchant the bow with a CE Fortify Marksman.

There are numerous weapon balancing mods for Morrowind, you may find one that does what you like, or may find it more satisfactory to design your own. Some touch only weapon stats, others go farther, tweaking skill associations, etc. (for example making marksman depend on agility rather than strength). (Also note the unarmored skill is bugged - it doesn't work unless you are wearing one piece of armor, so there are mods which convert an ordinary item - pair of gloves, shoes, a hat, an amulet - into armor, with a rating of 1.)

It does seem Bethesda made the early levels of a marksman character less powerful than a melee fighter, they did this also with magic based characters (play a pure mage sometime - no weapon or armor skill at all); but this is balanced by both being quite powerful later in the game. A lvl 50 swordsman is still going toe-to-toe with his enemies, but a lvl 50 archer can drop a dremora lord from 100yds with one or two hits. Add Constance as a melee fighter companion and take your time in the early stages of the game.

[Sniffles]

Thanks for the reply!

Okay. Confused I am. My character hit 100 marksman after a week of play. Was a stroll in the park. And her damage ability remained zip. Usually 2 shots to kill a rat with a steel bow.

When we encountered the werewoof I switched from bonemold to the 14 daedric arrows I had found. Bow was at about 50%. No significant increase in damage was noted.

Made some items that raised marksman to about 160. No increase in damage. Made the shield that increased strength to about 110 from around 25. Easily tripled the damage.

A shield is weird. Equip it then equip the bow. Shield vanishes. Armor rating (unarmored) has gone down and stays down. It is still equipped.

With the only armor the daedric tower shield, heavy armor, light armor skill goes up. She has had no training. Has worn only the daedric tower shield. Presently her armor is light 77, medium 22, heavy 17. I have no idea why her light armor keeps going up.

Bonemold arrows do more damage than steel. All info contradicts this but it's true.

I haven't found any ebony arrows yet. PC is level 9.

[jgf]

If your bow was at 50% health it was drastically weakened, and if your player's strength was low (if their lvl is only 9 then strength couldn't be very high) their marksman damage was low also. Some data on formula and stats:

www.reddit.com/r/Morrowind/comments/2uo8ew/is_there_something_wrong_with_the_bow/

en.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Marksman

And threads on marksman in general:

forums.uesp.net/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=28328

forums.uesp.net/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=32168

And about unarmored skill: en.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Unarmored
Emma mentions the unarmored bug and solution: emmates.proboards.com/thread/56/protection-unarmored-companions

Even if you have no armor skill, wearing armor in combat will raise that skill, as will reading skill books; this will not affect your unarmored skill when you are unarmored. Bonemold and steel arrows have the same damage range (1-4) but bonemold are 50% heavier so that may factor into damage. Note that either arrow will do random damage within that 1-4 range on any hit, but your stats and skills affect the probability of higher or lower damage; also, though it may visually appear every arrow "hits" its target, there is a random factor here, and also affected by the character's level, skills, and stats (this applies to all weapons in Morrowind).

There is a mod that makes marksmen even more fun, don't recall the name (my computer with Morrowind on it lies in pieces right now) but it adds a fletcher's shop to Balmora which sells virtually every type of bow and arrow plus a few new ones, along with materials for making your own arrows (these materials can also be found randomly in the game), and instruction books for making arrows.

I do not know if later versions of Morrowind removed this bug, but it 's worth trying: cast a bound bow spell, put the bow in your inventory then drop it on the ground, wait til the spell expires then pick up the bow. You will have a permanent bound bow with full power, full health that never degrades, and zero weight.

[Sniffles]

Thanks much, jgf. It all makes sense now. Marksman only affects your ability to hit. The damage you do depends on the number of dead p[uppies along the roads to Riften and how many people pee in the corners in the Crypt of Hearts.

It's comical. I was approaching this from being a semi pro in archery IRL. That, quite literally, couldn't be more wrong->
IRL: Damage is according to accuracy, the bow always delivers the same energy. If the bow doesn't deliver the same energy you are drawing it differently each time = you're a complete piece of poo and need to find a different sport as you will never be accurate. Archery is all about repeat-ability, placing a group of arrows always in the same place. Then you just adjust that location to the center. Strength of bow, poundage, has the minor effect of arc which equates to how long the arrow is in flight which incites more drag and windage issues. A portion of the greater poundage issue is offset by the extended gather time of the arrow. (Not everybody can afford titanium core carbon microfiber wrapped shafts at $25-$50 a pop. Do they even make those anymore?).
All very scientific, which got tossed in the trash when they cooked up the bow stuff in the game.

On a side note, the accuracy was what got me fascinated and into the sport. A guy who later became my mentor took a bow new to him and shot about 10 arrows at 80 feet. His group was around 4 inches across, high and left of the center around 18 inches. He slowly moved the group down to the bullseye after around 40 arrows. The entire group moved. No stray arrows. Near perfect repeatability in draw, hold and release.

And of course, bows degrade and weaken. After about 5000 shots a good bow, carbon fiber, will lose about .5% of it's memory. A good archer automatically compensates for that until the sad day, after around 20,000 - 50,000 shots, a bow has lost as much as 2%-5% of the memory and gets sold because it has become soggy. Or in Tamriel, a bow made of the best material in the world looses 50% to 90% of it's memory within 100 shots depending, apparently, on how tight the bow is gripped. But this is easily remedied by pounding on your bow with a hammer. (IRL, when you become proficient with the bow you don't even wrap your fingers around the grip. You're fingers are extended, the grip held against your palm by the string draw. As you release the arrow your grasp the grip. That way your hand doesn't try to twist, influence the shot as you release.)


As for unarmored. Squishy got to fudging. Pendant, rings, belt, pants and skirt all maxed to improve unarmored. Our heroine goes topless as she has several shirts with various charmed effects. This had the vast improvement of keeping our darling alive 5 and sometimes even 10 seconds longer with 190+ unarmored and 160+ armor rating. She tested this out by duking it out with Ragnards the Rude. Essentially unarmored through the ceiling level 9 character is roughly equal to a butt naked level 20-30 character, survivability wise. IE Tanks R Us mentality in the developers minds.

PS You can always tell the male influence of the developers in any of these games. Massive beefcake muscles, 10 tons of hideous armor, and the mandatory DDDD cups, scanty skimpy attire along with an 18 inch rear bumper in the females. Roughly following the equation, pencil envy x inadequacy complex x testosterone / (shrinking testicle syndrome x weaning failure).
That is, average macho video game hero = if my dog looked like that I'd shave it's butt and teach it to walk backwards.

[blockhead]

Mar 4, 2018 23:00:49 GMT Sniffles said:

the mandatory DDDD cups, scanty skimpy attire along with an 18 inch rear bumper

Actually, in stock (no body replacer mods) Morrowind, we're talking a B cup and a flat butts. This makes Morrowind unusual, relative to all the DDDD, (heck maybe even E, G?) women in games.

p.s. I am not disagreeing with you. I'm pointing out that Morrowind is different from the run of the mill video games.

[Sniffles]

Agreed. The same can be said for most of the Bethseda games. And Bethseda did their utmost to get the best ESRB rating. The big bucks in management and marketing had the final say.

But Morrowind is different in other ways. After years of playing Oblivion, Skyrim, and FO 3, 4 and FNV, only FO 4 comes close to the scope. (FNV = Oblivion, capitalizing on previous game success. See every inch of the map in 3 to 5 days of game play with a <5 level character.) Morrowind could use a rewrite. Use modern day hi res graphics and take a page from FO 4's book. Get rid of the leveled lists completely and divide up the map by hazard. Player beware. That alone can easily triple or quadruple the play time. Doing that would be easy with Morrowind. Some locations that take weeks to get into and stay alive for more than a single encounter.

And as for scope. Replaying Morrowind displays how pathetic Oblivion is. And Skyrim. Leyawin to Bruma or Anvil to Cheydinhal 10 times per play session, or Riften to Markarth to Solitude to Winterhold each and every time you play. Mods are mandatory for anything that came after Morrowind.

[jgf]

Mar 5, 2018 1:02:03 GMT Sniffles said:

... Morrowind could use a rewrite. ...

There is the Morroblivion project, attempting to recreate Morrowind on the Oblivion engine:

tesrenewal.com/forums/morroblivion/mods/753

And a rather convoluted guide to setting it up according to one person's "required mods" specs:

nsfwmods.com/forums/topic/40-anatriaxs-guide-to-morroblivion/



I've not tried this, since my Morrowind is so heavily modded and Morroblivion is apparently just the default game, but supposedly all the quests work (within the confines of Oblivion programming) and the map is accurate.