Magicka Combat - Morrowind Mechanics

hey gang what's good welcome to my Morrowind video guide all about approaching combat as a spellcaster and defending yourself against enemy spellcasters while we will be going over a few recommendations and examples I won't be covering each individual spell effect in the game here however the completionist in me has got me considering doing a brief run covering precisely that anyways we're going to begin by going over more basic concepts where those who may be unfamiliar so as always feel free to use the timestamps in the description to skip ahead to where you see fit many would agree that becoming a strong dedicated spell caster in morrowind begins at character creation utilizing magical multipliers you can give your spell-casting character a solid start allowing for more spells to be cast in combat before resting in allowing for just more powerful high-cost spells to be at your disposal assuming you can manage to cast light you can get these multipliers from being an alt mer or Breton or being born under the mage apprentice or Atronach first signs keep in mind though that through mid to late game enchanting you can give your character more than sufficient magical reserves with fortification effects so multipliers are hardly necessary in the long run while we're still on the topic of birth signs it's useful to be aware that you can easily overcome the Atronach stunted magical limitation through use of several conjuration spells simply summon a creature that uses spells into combat with it and absorb its Magica attacks as needed picking conjuration as a major or minor scale will also net you a free summon ancestral ghost spell which can be used for exactly these means just be sure to save beforehand in the event you fail at casting the summon spell if you're an ant renege burst sign and completely out of Magica you can receive blessings from temple shrines or Imperial cult altars that may also be absorbed work also early game creatures like matching scribbs cast spells as well that can be used if you're really desperate they don't restore that much anyways your maximum Magica is calculated simply by multiplying your intelligence attribute by your magical multiplier by default your multiplier is 1 so just add any of your bonus multipliers on top of that and voila when you've exhausted your magical reserves your magic ax will regenerate when your character is resting assuming you don't have stunted magic Oh like we just covered magical regenerates at a rate of your intelligence multiplied by 0.15 unlike later games this regeneration doesn't occur passively if you're brand new to the game keep in mind that you can rest in the wilderness to easily restore your magic ax or health gauges before combat encounters albeit that's at a risk of waking up to an attack from local wildlife of course if you have them you can also use scrolls and potions to replenish your magic ax but I really recommend saving them to use during tougher encounters as you can't rest in combat or when enemies are nearby whenever it does come down to combat there's two types of spell attacks on touch and on target they're straightforward in that on touch requires melee range contact and on target fires a range projectile there's also on self spells but these are typically used for buffing and healing your own character not attacking while you have a spell readied you cannot use any equipped shields to block but just as with using two-handed weapons any enchantments and armor provided by the shield still effects your character unlike melee and ranged weapons any magnitude range is seen on spell tooltips are true to standard expectations in that your spells magnitude is randomly generated within that range note that you cannot crit using spells of morrowind also you cannot charge up spells like later gamez for a more powerful effect one final general tidbit of advice you can delete a spell from your character's spell menu by holding shift and clicking on whichever one you want to remove upon casting a spell there's sometimes a chance that you'll fail a casting it the casting animation will play your magickal will be spent but the spell effect won't go off and you'll get a failure notification so to prevent this from happening as much as possible let's take a look at the formula used in calculating your cast chance mind you that the majority of spells follow this formula but a select handful do not and just have a guaranteed cast chance for example Khajiit s-- racial night I spell anyways because it's unrealistic to expect folks to be regularly plugging in numbers and running formulae during the game let's take a look at each individual part of this formula so we can draw some more useful conclusions first and foremost your base cast chance percentage is your spells respective skill multiplied by two from this point every five points of willpower and every ten points of luck increase your success chance by 1% this means that willpower is arguably the most important attribute for a spell caster then your cast chance is reduced by your spells magic a costs in the mid to late game this can really hurt you as you begin experimenting with more powerful high-cost spells on top of that your cast chance is also reduced by any sound spell effects active on you sound is an illusion spell effect similar to silence except with a variable magnitude think of it kind of like how chameleon works relative to invisibility thankfully such effects are usually pretty uncommon finally all of that is impacted by your current fatigue relative to your maximum fatigue this is commonly referred to as your fatigue modifier depending on your current fatigue age you can have as high as a plus 25% modifier or as low as a minus 25% modifier mind you that this is multiplicative and not additive it's worth pointing out that you can get a quick idea of your caste chance for your currently selected spell while you're playing by just checking the little red bar under its icon on your HUD finally I'd like to point out that spells cast from enchanted items always have a 100 percent chance to succeed you won't be leveling spell skills this way but rather your enchanting skill anyways check out my enchanting guide if you want more on that it's a little lengthy so now that we have a firm understanding of how spell damage is produced let's look at how we and our opponents can defend against spell attacks once a spell makes contact with its victim it is first ran by the victims absorb Magica and reflect effects if present the order in which these defenses are used depends entirely on when they were applied to the victim in question for example if your character was born under the Atronach birth sign absorb Magica will always take precedence over reflect both of these effects completely negate spell damage but in different ways when it comes to absorb Magica each instance of it is individually ran against incoming spell damage when absorbed Magica does activate the spell damage is completely negated and the magic a cost of said spell is restored entirely to the entity that absorbed it reflect spell effects however do additively stack up so it's totally possible to have 100% reflect chance there's a few important notes on this though the first is that thankfully this doesn't affect spells that only consist of positive effects so you don't need to worry about out losing out on things like blessings from marwan's various religious organizations secondly the reflect effect occurs immediately so there's no need to worry about positioning if you're trying to reflect ranged spells finally spells can only be reflected once so if an enemy reflects one of your spell's you won't be able to reflect it back at them no matter what after any present reflect or absorb magic effects have ran their course the spells final damage is calculated using this formula now this one's quite simple damage is just whatever number was randomly generated from the range listed in the spells tooltip assuming it even has a range and not a specific set magnitude resistance is just any applicable resist Magica or resist element effect I should point out that poison shock frost and fire damage are only affected by their respective resistances not the resist magic effect similar to reflect effects resistances only impact negative effects and each instance of resistance stacks up additively so you can build up to 100% resistances to safely consume potions or use enchantments that have both beneficial and harmful effects as a spell caster it can be important to also be aware of racial resistances when you're fighting NPCs so let's take a look at what to be wary of avoid using fire damage against dunmer enemies who sport a hearty 75% resist fire I really recommend against using fire damage pretty much all together since morrowind is the homeland of the dummer people so they'll comprise the majority of the NPC's you encounter anyhow if you decide to instead use frost damage watch offering Nords who are completely immune to frost if you're heading up to Seoul time for the Blood Moon expansion the same warning about fire damage applies here there's a lot of Nords up there poison damage has similar issues but to a lesser extent argonians are fully immune to poison and Red Guards have a strong 75% resistance to poison the saving grace is that there's just fewer argonians and Red Guards in Morrowind and its expansions shock damage begins to run into problems also when it comes to nords but to a lesser extent than defrost North's have a 50% resistance to shock damage if you're running with something like a drain health or absorb health spell watch out for the resist Magica passives that bretons and orcs have thankfully these races are also relatively uncommon now looking back at the spell damage formula we can see that weakness spell effects can be utilized to counteract resistances and just increase spell damage overall consider using weakness effects to get more damage out of your spells as they all only have a base cost of two not to mention that if you're using weaknesses with damage over time spells the weakness effect only needs to be active for the first initial second of your damage over time spell it'll end up bolstering that spells damage for its entire duration oh and I guess I should also point out that a homer are passively weak to pretty much all forms of Magica except for poison okay I think that ought to put a nice bow on morrowind spell caster offense and defense thank you so much for checking out this guide video and be sure to check out my other ones just as well in case there's something of value to you there and I've also got a weekly Morrowind playthrough on max difficulty if you're into those sorts of videos give them a look - thanks again peace

Channel: Lyle Shnub

Views: 123,676

Keywords: Morrowind, Elder Scrolls, Walkthrough, Magic, Wizard Build, Mage Build, Caster Build, Spells, Spell Effects, Caster character, Magicka, Absorb Magicka, Reflect Magicka, Spell Resistance, Guide, Tips, Formula, Spell Damage, Cast Chance, Failed to cast spell, spell failed, wizard build, best spells, how to cast spells, using magicka morrowind, stunted magicka, spell formula, types of spells morrowind, how to delete spells, morrowind delete spell, elemental damage morrowind

Id: NULzOdtqqr4

Length: 13min 6sec (786 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 05 2017