Problem with skill levels

moltovir · Post by **moltovir** » Thu Mar 23, 2006 11:08 am

While waiting for Oblivion to be released in Flanders I reinstalled Morrowind to "get in the game" again. I used to play it with 200+ mods, but now I'm just using some basic ones, being:

abot Water Life
abot Where Are All Birds Going
Complete Morrowind parts 1-6
Super Adventurers
"adventurers_tribunal.esp" <- this came with the SA package but isn't mentioned in the readme, I suppose it makes SA compatible with Tribunal?
Morrowind Enhanced
Combat / Writing / Journal Enhanced
Better Bodies
The LGNPC series
Vivec Replacement
Baldurdash' Text Patch

The problem is, whenever I use a skill, that skill goes up way too much. One Fireball gives me 8 points in the progress bar for Destruction, creating 5 potions gave me a full level in Alchemy. I've already cleaned all the plugins and merged the dialogue, objects and leveled lists with TesTool, and changed the loading time of the plugins so Super Adventurers is always loaded last, but nothing helps. I'd be grateful if someone could clarify this problem a bit, it's really being a pain in the proverbial ass

fable · Post by **fable** » Thu Mar 23, 2006 1:38 pm

Super Adventurers
"adventurers_tribunal.esp" <- this came with the SA package but isn't mentioned in the readme, I suppose it makes SA compatible with Tribunal?

Yes, that's the Adventurers mod for those who use Tribunal. I'm not quite sure why it was included with SuperAdventurers, since the changes to SA are supposedly tweaks that affect your character more than anything else.

In any case, here are the skill proficiency changes caused by SuperAdventurers:

Axe - 1 per successful use
Blunt weapon - 0.95 per successful use
Long Blade - 0.85 per successful use (slower)
Marksman - 1.2 per successful use
Short Blade - 0.80 per successful use
Spear - 1.1 per successful use

Acrobatics - 0.14 per jump (slower)
Alchemy - 3 per potion created, .75 per ingredient used
Alteration - 2 per successful use
Armorer - 0.55 per successful use
Athletics - 0.03 per second of running, 0.05 per second of swimming
Block - 2.6 per successful use
Conjuration - 1.7 per successful use
Destruction - 1.1 per successful use
Enchant - 7 per item recharged, 0.16 for using magic item, 15 per item created
Hand to Hand - 2 per successful use
Heavy Armor - 0.95 per hit by opponent
Illusion - 1.4 per successful use
Light Armor - 1.2 per hit by opponent
Medium Armor - 1.1 per hit by opponent
Mercantile - 0.35 per bargain, 1.25 per bribe
Mysticism - 2.5 per successful use
Restoration - 1.4 per successful use
Security - 3.75 per trap defeated, 3 per lock picked
Sneak - 1 per successful avoid notice, 4.6 per successful pick-pocket
Speechcraft - 2.2 per successful persuasion, 0.25 for failure
Acrobatics - 0.14 per jump (faster)
Unarmored - 1.7 per hit by opponent (faster)

Try taking adventurers_tribunal.esp out by itself, and see if that makes enough of a difference.

moltovir · Post by **moltovir** » Thu Mar 23, 2006 3:19 pm

When I de-activate the adventurers_tribunal esp, nothing changes. When I use just the tribunal esp without the main superadventurers esp I get a load of "missing object" errors when I start up the game, so apparently it's dependant of the main esp. It's pretty weird that the tribunal esp is in the SA package but doesn't get mentioned in the readme, is this esp required if you want to run SA with Tribunal? Or should I deselect it and start a new game? I'll try to do some more tests tomorrow, meanwhile I really need to get some sleep

fable · Post by **fable** » Thu Mar 23, 2006 3:55 pm

They never were clear about why Adventurers_Tribunal was included. I suspect it merely adds a few new items and rebalances a few others in Tribunal. Try disabling both Adventurers and SA, and see if your skill advancement rate slows. Honestly, I can't see anything else in that list of mods that could be causing this behavior--but I also don't know why your character is advancing so quickly, even with SA running. The only one I haven't tried is Combat Enhanced, and I know that doesn't affect skills.

moltovir · Post by **moltovir** » Sat Mar 25, 2006 8:32 am

I did a few more tests this morning, making new characters and casting a Conjuration spell as soon as I was able to.

With SA and the tribunal esp, I get 8 "progress points" per cast.
Without the tribunal esp, I get 6.
Without both SA and tribunal it drops to 4.

So apparently, whenever the game finds an edited value in an esp, it adds that value to the original value in morrowind.esm rather than using the last one. I searched the construction set for the values set in different mods, and found this:

-Baldurdash' Text Patch: the value is also 1.0, but it's marked * which means it was changed and later changed back to its original value (also known as a GSMT if I recall correctly). Pretty weird, since I used TESTool to clean all my plugins.
-adventurers_tribunal.esp doesn't change any value, in fact it changes almost nothing. The only things that were marked where the counts of adamantium weapons and armour. The conjuration skill isn't edited, so my "add changed values to the original one" theory fails here.
-SuperAdventurers.esp changes the value to 1.70

1.00 (original) + 1.00 (Baldurdash) + 1.70 (SA) = only 4.70, so I'd need another changed value of 3.30 to get the 8.00 my game gives. Adventurers_tribunal seems to add 2 even though the value is unchanged, so that still leaves a value of ~1.30 that I can't find anywhere.

Edit: I made a new esp that changes the Conj value to 10.00 and used that with all the "problematic" mods. When I cast a Conj spell now, I get +36 to my progress bar. The maths involved seem to be a bit more complicated than I had first thought...

Edit #2: I edited my esp to give Conj a very low value (0.1). Ingame, casting a Conj spell gave me roughly ~1 point in that skill. Quoting Robert Fripp: "Confusion will be my epitaph"

fable · Post by **fable** » Sat Mar 25, 2006 9:01 am

Sheesh--sounds like they missed something important when they made that mod.

Good catch. The easy way of dealing with it would probably have been to load another skills advancement tweaker after SA, since last in controls whenever two mods argue over stats.

I suppose I'll stop using SA, then, next time I play through MW. The one thing I really did like about SA was its removal of the fatigue penalty for running, since I hated the walking pace in the game. But I could just as easily increase speed to compensate, via the console.

moltovir · Post by **moltovir** » Sat Mar 25, 2006 9:09 am

Even deactivating SA doesn't help, so the best thing I can do is uninstalling Morrowind and buying Oblivion I guess

Greg. · Post by **Greg.** » Sat Mar 25, 2006 9:14 am

You could just put the esp on summit...

moltovir · Post by **moltovir** » Sat Mar 25, 2006 9:27 am

What do you mean? *dazzled expression*

Greg. · Post by **Greg.** » Sat Mar 25, 2006 4:10 pm

[QUOTE=moltovir]Edit: I made a new esp that changes the Conj value to 10.00 and used that with all the "problematic" mods. When I cast a Conj spell now, I get +36 to my progress bar. The maths involved seem to be a bit more complicated than I had first thought...

Edit #2: I edited my esp to give Conj a very low value (0.1). Ingame, casting a Conj spell gave me roughly ~1 point in that skill. Quoting Robert Fripp: "Confusion will be my epitaph"

[/QUOTE]

If you put that ESP on summit, then it might help other people with the same problem...