Spells: Illusion - Morrowind Mechanics

hey gang what's good welcome to another Morrowind mechanics video guide this time we're looking at the functionality of all the illusion spell effects hopefully you'll be able to get more use out of this often tragically overlooked school of magic we'll be going over things in roughly alphabetical order but also grouping together similar effects where it makes sense as always feel free to refer to the timestamps I've written out in the description if you're looking for a specific effect first on our list is blind being blinded essentially overrides the gamma and brightness of your in-game world higher magnitudes increase this effect so at 100 you can't see anything at all menus like the mini-map are still usable and can be a good workaround if needed you can actually get around the visual effects of blind by raising the gamma and brightness of your monitor but honestly it's hardly worth the trouble behind the scenes blind effects also impact a few of the formulas used by the game blind affects both the sneak check formula used to detect the player when sneaking and the hit chance formula used to determine whether attacks from range to melee weapons will land that said there's usually better options in combat compared to blind if you're looking to debuff that on an opponent usually when sneaking chameleon effects are more practical and we'll cover those in just a bit when in combat paralysis is often more practical than blind as well however in case you're being blinded yourself you know maybe you're using the boots of blinding speed it's important to recognize the impact the effect is having on your own stats if you're playing an unmodified we'll actually substantially buff your hit chance with weapons however if you're using a bug fixing mod like the unofficial moorwen code patch then blind works properly and reduces your chain to hit moving on let's cover both chameleon and invisibility they work similarly in allowing your character to more easily sneak around undetected both effects add to the formula used to determine how sneaky your character is chameleon effects add whatever their magnitude is and invisibility always adds 100 if you have multiple sources of chameleon the effects are cumulative the key difference is that invisibility effects are cancelled whenever your character interacts with the world chameleon effects don't share this limitation and allow all interactions for their duration the catch is that chameleon effects are usually just more costly and it takes some work to reach that 100 magnitude the equivalent of an invisibility effect because of how the formulae work in theory and NPC with high enough stats should be able to detect an invisible or 100 chameleons player so I went out and tested this myself using console commands to boost in NPC stats as you can see an NPC with sufficient stats can detect you if you're using a cumulative 100,000,000 effect or an invisibility effect that said there are very very few NPC's in the game with stats that high you probably also need to have your own auxilary stats be buffed you know like agility and your sneak stat itself generally speaking a 70 magnitude chameleon effect is totally sufficient next on the list is charm this simply raises the disposition of an NPC by the effects magnitude for its duration although higher magnitudes are difficult to cast early on consider using a charm effect alongside of fortify personality effect keep in mind that time and durations are paused when you open dialog so you can easily keep charm durations very low using just the bare minimum that you personally need next let's go over light and night.i both of these effects help your character see in darkened areas however they do this in slightly different ways light essentially causes the affected person or creature to emit light as though they were a torch or lantern night I on the other hand essentially raises the brightness and gamma settings of your game you can easily enter the game menus and increase your gamma for almost the same effect next up is paralyze this is one of the most useful combat related spells in the entire game at least in my opinion it does exactly what you'd expect for the most part however there's just a few important notes on how it works first and foremost while you can rely on paralyze spells for most of the game be warned that many enemies in the Blood Moon and tribunal expansions are either immune or resistant paralyze vampires in the base game are also completely immune on the topic of resistances and immunity it's worth noting that willpower does make a character more resistant to paralyze rarely is this ever a factor but there are a handful of boss tier encounters where this actually is relevant despite all of this paralyze is still very much worth considering making use of especially if you are a hand-to-hand combatant when punching a paralyzed enemy you no longer need to punch through their fatigue meter first you'll immediately start to damage their health with each punch although hand-to-hand is still generally a poor choice when it comes to damage this does help immensely finally I guess it's worth pointing out that airborne and aquatic creatures will all fall or float when paralyzed cliff racers will plummet to the ground and slaughter fish will float to the water's surface now let's take a look at sanctuary very simply it increases the odds that a character will completely evade an attack from a weapon sanctuary effects also stack together additively like chameleon effects do this combined with its low base costs of just one makes sanctuary perhaps the most powerful defensive effect in the entire game when it comes to fighting any character or creature who is not using spells let's now check out silence and sound effects sound effects they they both actually work quite similarly to invisibility and chameleon effects if you're familiar with RPGs then you probably already know that silence is going to prevent a character from casting spells for the effects duration sound works kind of like that but instead of outright stopping spell casting altogether it instead reduces the targets cast chance the important detail here is that while under the effects of sound the enemy in question may still attempt to cast spells essentially wasting their magic ax the catch is that if the magnitude of your sound spell is too high and reduces your targets cast chance down to zero then your target won't attempt to cast their spells at all they treat it as if they were silenced the idea is to use a magnitude that's high but not too high personally I'd recommend somewhere between 50 and 80 magnitudes obviously your mileage is going to vary especially against targets that are resistant or susceptible to Magica and at the end of the day none of these effects are actually the ideal way to reach this goal instead if you're able to opt for damage Magica or damage intelligence effects from the destruction school they're typically more costly but also more potent finally I save the more esoteric effects for last that being calm demoralized friends and rally they're all sort of related so I thought it would be easier to explain them by grouping them together before we move on it's important that you're aware of a certain bug well it's more of an oversight than a bug you see demoralise humanoid is actually classified as a mysticism spell obviously though if you're running the unofficial morrowind code patch or something like that you don't got worried about this among the many hidden values inherit to each NPC and creature in the game there's the fight and flee AI tendencies it's easiest to think of these two tendencies as a character's combat morale the fight value dictates whether or not a character will enter combat with you and flee dictates whether or not a character will try to run away or retreat from you if they do enter combat with you on screen now is a range of fight values and how characters will react depending on their fight value the majority of regular passive NPCs you can speak to begin with both of these values fight and flee set to 30 this means that no matter how much they dislike you you don't ever need to worry about them attacking as the fight value increases from 30 they're more and more likely to engage in combat the lower your disposition is and the closer you get to them at 90 fight NPCs will begin combat with you if you move too close to them regardless of their disposition towards you I tried to dig it up similar ranges for the flee value and attempted some testing of my own but honestly I wasn't able to get very much that's concrete in fact throughout my testing I found that a lot of the five value details were either incorrect or incomplete despite this table being relatively widespread neutral NPCs didn't enter combat until an 85 value with zero disposition so shoot for around a 50 point magnitude effect alongside a zero disposition give or take depending on your tar it's resistances and vulnerabilities of course remind you that frenzy also isn't considered a hostile spell so it can be a good replacement for taunting and speech craft you don't even need a long duration on the effect once an NPC is locked into combat with you it's totally fine if the effect fades just make sure your target gets in the first hit in anyway going back to the flee values here's what I was able to uncover on them you see flee has several factors similar to fight and how it accounts for distance and disposition one of the factors is health as the characters health decreases during combat they're going to become more likely to run away if their flee value is already high enough opponents are also likely to retreat if their flee value is once again high enough and you're currently brandishing a melee weapon while your opponent has access to either a ranged weapon or a spell finally there's several situations where opponents will always lead such situations include you suddenly disappearing for example if you used an invisibility effect or you levitating into the air out of melee range and if well the last one is kind of a spoiler look away now if you're wary of such things I'll have it on screen now visual only alright we're out of spoiler territory now anyway going back to flee if you happen to know the exact specifics of how these flee factors are all used please feel free to leave a comment I absolutely welcome it I'm sure I'm not the only one before we move on let me just say that if you're curious about what these values actually are as you're playing you can check them yourself using the get fight and get flee console commands on the character in question okay now going all the way back to the actual spell effects they are used to alter both the fight and flee values as you may have guessed when it comes to the fight value friends affects raise it and calm effects lower it as for the flee value rally effects raise it and demoralize effects lower it let me just say real quick special thanks to redditor Yossi Lamas for helping out with this next part there's apparently a rather significant bug with these spell effects when used in conjunction with a speech craft system you see these effects allow fight and flight values to be increased or decreased higher than 100 and lower than zero this usually isn't a problem but if while the spell effect is still active you attempt persuasion on that same NPC you'll bug out the relevant value this seems to be because the speech craft and persuasion system uses what's called clamped stats essentially that means that the values within that system are locked between 0 and 100 it seems like they just don't mesh that well together unfortunately this doesn't seem to be fixed at all with the Morrowind code patch now if you've seen my speech craft video you may already recognize this footage here this is actually the bug in action in this situation the opponent should actually be pacified completely rather than constantly fleeing so the easiest way around all of this is just to limit the magnitudes of these four effects using the ranges we went over earlier you'll want to avoid going overboard mind you that some creatures and races are more resistant or susceptible to Magica meaning things can get a little difficult so just make sure you click Save ahead of time I'll also have a link in the description to Yossi llamas comments to me if you're interested they put a lot of work into their comments and I think it'd be a shame to just withhold that information well that ought to be it when it comes to the illusion spell school in morrowind even if you decide to avoid rally frenzy all of that absolutely consider making use of illusions other very powerful effects they're simple enough to understand and they'll get you pretty far now if you're curious about making your own illusion spells or doing combat using magic ax be sure to check out my other mechanics guides covering just that there's tons of other details in there as well and I'm still adding to it I've also got a weekly playthrough going of more wind on maximum difficulty if you're into that sort of thing new ones are popping out every Monday I have none of that interests you thank you nonetheless for watching this one peace [Music]

Channel: Lyle Shnub

Views: 47,312

Keywords: walkthrough, commentary, gameplay, Morrowind Mondays, Morrowind Gameplay, TES3, Elder Scrolls 3, Morrowind, tes3 morrowind, morrowind guide, morrowind guide to magic, morrowind guide for beginners, morrowind tips, morrowind illusion, morrowind spells, morrowind mechanics, illusion, fight, flee, morrowind, morrowind blind, boots of blinding speed, spells, blind, chameleon, invisibility, charm, light, night eye, paralyze, sanctuary, silence, sound, calm, demoralize, frenzy, rally, stat clamp, tutorial

Id: bsl2oJdjMzU

Length: 16min 13sec (973 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 07 2017