Oblivion Armor and Spell Effectiveness Talk

[@Artemicion321]

I enjoy that so many of these videos have the phrase "As long as you're not a Bosmer you'll be fine".

[@BiscuitDelivery]

I've never liked their armor rating system since it makes low amounts of armor practically worthless and the last few points to 85 are insanely strong.

[@IgnimortisTC]

Personally, I think armor skills increasing only by getting hit is kind of a weird idea, especially for light armor, which is supposed to be good for mobility and NOT getting hit. A Skyrim mod called Ordinator had a decent idea - you still can improve by getting hit, but not getting hit and spending time in combat moving around in armor also granted armor experience.

[@theoldknight85]

Good point, I hope they implement something similar in ES6.

[@Encephalophage]

I would agree if this weren't so easily cheese-able with "Bethesda AI" Just jump on top of a ledge and run into a corner while opponents smear their faces into the wall below you, shouting milk toast insults all the while Reminiscent of using docile rats to get 100 Sneak before leaving the sewers, actually

[@IgnimortisTC]

@@Encephalophage It's pretty much unavoidable, though. There's not much difference between this and standing in place while rats whale at you, except you also cast weak Restoration spells to power level that as well.

[@Encephalophage]

@@IgnimortisTC True enough, as long as there is a way to exploit a system, there will be someone able and willing to find a way to do so (It's me, I'm the someone)

[@daedalus6433]

@@EncephalophageIt's a singleplayer game, it's up to them if they want to cheese

[@grantlewis1995]

I really appreciate the deep dive Oblivion arithmetic videos. I find that you have a particularly succinct and informative style.

[@johnfromwales6713]

Another reason why i prefer Heavy Armour over Light; Heavy Armour is one of the 9 skills that can be chosen to be lowered when you go to prison. That means you can lower it and raise it back up to level up beyond your normal max level.

[@josephpercy1558]

I feel like Illusion is such a crucial part of being a mage in Oblivion, particularly utilizing Frenzy effects to the max, and framing other spell effects around it. I think what makes mages more "unique" compared to the other classes is AoE control rather than raw damage output. The fact that illusion spells like Frenzy don't work on the highest leveled mobs without 100% spell effectiveness is, in my opinion, a mechanic that emphasizes more of that classic wizard vibe. I deemphasize Destruction spells, and if I go for raw damage at all, I'm usually customizing Destruction spells for more "cantrip" effects (spells with low magnitude + longer duration). I also don't think you're a real wizard if you have less than 100% spell effectiveness. You might as well be a warrior with a laser gun if you're wearing armor and flinging fireballs. 😅

[@theoldknight85]

I love my laser gun

[@josephpercy1558]

@@theoldknight85 That's fair. I think the laser effects look better in Skyrim, though

[@pattozebass9767]

last couple of levels is where those trainers really come into the conversation 😊

[@MultiYoshiman]

but seriously great video and great channel, just subbed and turned on notifs. elder scrolls's systems are very rarely talked about and examined critically.

[@JTrizzleFizzle]

I was wondering why my Charm wasn't actually increasing disposition. Is the only way to ensure Charm works is to not wear armor?

[@theoldknight85]

@@JTrizzleFizzle charm should actually work, it is just reduced. Command, Calm, rally, demoralize don’t work in armor at high levels

[@bronysaiyan5236]

I feel skyrim is exactly that at 2:50 lol cuz 567 is the armor hard cap. Anything higher does nothing so i feel 85% at 567 is the same as 500 being 83.333.

[@Scowleasy]

Part of why I love pelinel’s armor. It levels with you

[@delvegameguides]

No league of legends has a diminishing returns system. It's luckily not possible to stack armor and be immune to physical damage. My understanding is that the graph would look like a steep linear decline. The nice thing about that, is that a small amount of armor can be surprisingly valuable, which is nice on some characters. And it also encourages you to have a well rounded character, balancing stats like armor, magic resistance, and health. But obviously in oblivion it's more fun to be hyper resistant to physical attacks and stuff like that.

[@theoldknight85]

The system I showed on the bottom IS a diminishing return system. That is why even at 10k armor rating it is only 99% damage reduction. Edit: I realize I said "there's no diminishing returns there" but what I meant is that the diminishing returns baked into that formula cancels out the reverse diminishing returns inherent in armor, so each point of armor has the same value, whether you are going from 0 to 1 rating or 99 to 100 rating.

[@delvegameguides]

​@@theoldknight85 Oh I see it would be much easier to think about it as a curve that never touches the 100% axis at the top. So the downward (non) linear curve would be armor on the X axis and effective health gain per point on the Y. yeah a non diminishing return graph WOULD be linear. It is important to note that lol also does weird stuff like you actually just have 20-100 armor and magic resistance dependent upon character and level, not taking into account items, which is a holdover artifact from games like warcraft 3. AND there's essentially a cap on how much armor you're realistically supposed to obtain depending on your type of character, so the practical range of the curve is actually somewhat narrow.

[@billybob7212]

Another great deep dive OldKnight, i was curious to see if you might share some more of your spreadsheets? I have found the damage one from your 'damage formula' video very useful while creating my own personal balance mod 🙂

[@theoldknight85]

any in particular you are looking for? Movement speed is in the movement deep dive and you found the weapon damage, a lot of them are just my way of conveying information and are not very functional

[@billybob7212]

@theoldknight85 the main one is probably spell cost and damage as seen in your restoration and destruction deep dives. All good if you can't, keep up the great work!

[@catmus1506]

Does having enchanted rings and necklaces of shield affect the overall armour rating? I’ve got 60+ “armour” yet I still get staggered like a chump.

[@theoldknight85]

Shield spells (elemental ones too) work the same as armor from your equipment. At 60 armor you're taking twice as much damage as someone at 80. Could just be unlucky with some staggers, hard to say. Maybe khajiit just get staggered more :P

[@PrayForRagnorok]

My battle mage is at armor cap and has 100 agility, stagger is still fairly common. Dremora with two-handers knock you prone sometimes too.

[@exantiuse497]

@PrayForRagnorok The dremora knock you down because they have the expert Blade perk that lets them knock the opponent down with power attacks 5% of the time. It isn't related to the normal stagger any attack can cause

[@AtlasSoftworksUK]

Are you familiar with how the armour rating system works in Morrowind and do you think that's better? (Basically higher damaging attacks require more armor rating to mitigate, whereas with low-damaging attacks you can cap the damage reduction % with a lower armour value) I love it personally

[@Mr._Anderpson]

On the light vs heavy armor front, you're correct that endurance governs heavy armor & speed is attached to light armor. Like you said, you'll end up repairing light armor more because it is less durable. Armorer is governed by endurance. So, a character using light armor who takes armorer as a major skill can still see plenty of endurance gains in early to mid-level. Armorer training is cheap & easy to get. I think you can find trainers in just the Imperial City to get you from 0-100. Chances are you're rushing for 50 in your armorer skill to be able to repair magic items anyway. Anyone not wielding a two-handed weapon is probably going to use a shield. Seems almost everyone is going to see their block skill increasing steadily and that would make up the endurance benefit for taking the heavy armor route. I think hammers no longer break at armorer 100. Started a playthrough but haven't reached that point. Only needing to carry one is a big plus which helps make up for the ridiculous weapon weights as material tiers progress. I tend to carry 30 or so hammers at low level just because they break so frequently. Dropping that down to one pound is a benefit. What I'm saying is nearly every character will work on their armorer skill because of the perks, magic repair, damage buff and armor quality buff, & repair hammer durability. Its also possible to improve bound weapons to 125%. If you make a custom bound bow spell with a longer duration, it gives you time to make the detour to sharpen not such a chore. The drawback is bound bow requires 50 in conjuration, but conjuration is insanely easy to progress.

[@BeRitCrunk]

Unless I am mistaken, I'm pretty sure Oblivion deals in floating point values for health/damage. So while spell effectiveness may display very significant differences because of a small change from armor (100% > 95%) you will still receive the full 95% effectiveness. Same for your actual health. A spell healing for 10 may say it restores 9, because of the 95% effectiveness, but it will restore 9.5 health. I believe this also applies to damage. Even before all of the multipliers are accounted for, the actual damage between two weapons the UI is saying deal the same damage, can still be very different. Of course, then all of the other multipliers kick in. Naturally this all applies to player healthpool also. You maximum Health will be a whole number, but your current health will be a float value. Whether injury or healing, the current Health value will not be rounded under the hood. It just will not be readily displayed to the player until rolling over into the next digit, where 0.# values would always display as 1 until Health => 0. And for example, a player at 199.9999999 of 200 health would still display as 199 current. I believe all of this was the same for Morrowind, but maybe I'm wrong on both counts and it wasn't until Skyrim they bothered to float half of the variables so everything would, that's right, Just Work.

[@Venator-711]

Youre right about morrowind, dunno about oblivion or skyrim

[@rustyshovel7179]

Floating Points are used for damage in OBscript. Don't know if it has much effect though, there's some jank. For instance, in one of my mods you can inflict bleeding damage, the damage is based on the target's maximum health. But i had to make it default to 1 minimum, as damage values less than 1 wouldn't register. Not entirely sure of the cause, outside of "Bethesda jank" and "Maybe the health % isn't properly converting as a float for some reason"

[@NihilistDad]

A small shield spell can go a long way when you're a low/mid level in an armor skill.

[@kvernesdotten]

What I really wonder is why glass is considered light armor. Have the devs never lifted anything made of glass before?

[@theoldknight85]

haha I have never thought of that. Maybe it is magical light glass. Did that start in Daggerfall or Morrowind?

[@vitriolicAmaranth]

@@theoldknight85 Daggerfall had armour ranks rather than classes, and no actual armour skills. Armours did have variable weight. Glass was introduced in Morrowind because it's volcanic glass from Red Mountain; The fact that it appears in later installments is a little odd, though Oblivion is certainly a bit odd with both glass and dwarven appearing despite neither being "native" to Cyrodiil. Anyway, for both of those reasons, the classification of glass as light began in Morrowind. So in Daggerfall, each armour has a weight that is 1x, 2x or 3x the base weight of each piece. You could kind of think of these as light, medium and heavy armour, I suppose. With that in mind, the strongest light armour is actually ebony, which sort of makes sense in-lore; In Daggerfall it's called a metal, but starting in Morrowind it's somewhere between metal and glass, and it's also from Red Mountain, specifically being the congealed blood of Lorkhan/Shor that oozes from the Heart and gets spewed out in eruptions. But starting in Morrowind, ebony is the heavy counterpart to "glass." Obsidian, a volcanic glass probably most comparable to Morrowind glass and Daggerfall Ebony, has a specific gravity of around 2.6, while steel has a specific gravity of around 7.8 on average, meaning that, true to Daggerfall's ebony stats or glass's general classification as light armour, it weighs about 1/3 as much as steel. It's not about whether glass is a dense material to begin with, but how much it weighs relative to other armours. In Morrowind and Skyrim, the actual glass portions are also relatively small and appear to be strategically placed to deflect blows from the most oft-targeted areas, attached to another type of armour, which in Skyrim is explicitly elven alloy. That makes plenty of sense; Volcanic glass is harder than steel but also brittle, but when it does break it tends to chip off rather than disintegrate, so you wouldn't want to rely entirely on big plates of it like in Oblivion, but shards of it could plausibly deflect steel and chip or deform blade edges without adding much weight. All the more if it's fantasy glass that's a bit harder or a bit tougher. Daggerfall explicitly mentions that ebony is as light as leather, which is its own issue. Leather density can vary widely, but boiled leather, the kind depicted as leather armour in most of the series, is about 1.4 on average, actually about half as dense (or "heavy") as volcanic glass and only slightly denser than pure water (which has a specific gravity of 1 at 4C). But assuming Daggerfall's developers were aiming for realism and did think of that, the likely explanation is that a much thinner layer of a better material can provide superior protection, while for leather to be protective at all it has to be rather thick, probably half an inch or more in a world with enchanted blades. Thus a quarter inch of volcanic glass can offer exceptional protection while half an inch of leather weighs the same and offers only mediocre protection, which feels believable. TL;DR it may be magical glass and have different properties from real volcanic glass, but real volcanic glass is actually pretty light compared to the materials used in heavy armour in TES, like steel and brass. And it started in Morrowind.

[@olivercoates7076]

If you read some of the source material (there are books in both Morrowind and Skyrim at least), you'll know the 'glass' is completely unrelated to the glass used in windows. It's actually malachite - a real life mineral mostly composed of copper. In-universe malachite has magicka-absorbing properties and can be treated to increase its hardness. In real life, malachite is very brittle and would make absolutely awful armor. But that being said, it is closer to aluminum in density than iron, so in a relative since it is quite light. In Morrowind it is the heaviest light armor, and about on par with chainmails in weight, which is about right actually, if you made a suit of malachite in the real world.

[@vitriolicAmaranth]

@@olivercoates7076 It's only "malachite" in Skyrim and the usage of the term is inconsistent with both its preexisting lore and its properties. The whole mining/smithing/mineral system in Skyrim is so badly named, both in the context of lore and in the context of real-life mineralogy, that I have to assume it was one big joke by whoever was in charge of it. Corundum is the mineral name for sapphire, which contains no copper, yet it appears to be copper ore (ie actual malachite) and produces what appears to be copper bars, which are used to make... steel for some reason. Malachite, an ore of copper, turns into volcanic glass when you craft with it. Orichalcum, a mythical alloy in both real life _and_ pre-existing Elder Scrolls lore, which is supposed to resemble gold doped with copper to turn it red and in TES is most closely associated with the Redguards and Yokuda, is the mysterious green metal of the Orsimer, presumably because both start with Or-. Quicksilver is a solid metal, and is alloyed with... Moonstone, although it actually appears to be ordinary feldspar, a _rock_ in either case, to make the elven alloy that appears to be a type of brass (it's a fantasy alloy, to be fair, but smelting a rock with a metal to make anything is pretty weird). Ebony is about the only ore that is treated appropriately according to its lore, mostly occurring along the path between Adamantine Tower and Red Mountain as well as spread out near the Morrowind border, where it would have been spread by Red Mountain, but of course prior to Skyrim it was the only material that was "misnamed." There used to be a joke common in the community (haven't seen it in a long time) that it's a wonder they didn't have steel ore. It would have fit. The only mineral material you can interact with in Skyrim that doesn't seem to have anything wrong with its representation is iron.

[@kvernesdotten]

@@olivercoates7076 Haha I gotta admit im a bit torn between "that makes so much sense" and "well, thats not funny anymore" 😂 Amazing answer though!

[@olivercoates7076]

Here is a solution at level 1 using a skill easier to train to 100 than either armor skill that keeps 100% spell effectiveness and doesn't need repaired and comes with extra benefits. An apprentice alchemy set and Gnarl Bark + Potato + any other Fire Shield ingredient + any other Frost Shield ingredient. There are a number of combinations and since Potato is on there you can typically add Restore Fatigue pretty easily. You get an effective 58% shield. Nords and Bretons can stop here. Otherwise, add in Escutcheon of Chorrol at level 1 for 12 more armor and 10% reflect damage and you're at 70% shield w/ 10% reflect. The remaining 15% to level cap is pretty trivial: any two shield or elemental shield sigils on clothing items. You can get 7% elemental shield rings at level 1, if you can't find a single sigil, which gets to 84%. If you can get even one elemental shield sigil, even Bladeturn Hood at 5 shield at level 1 will get you to cap. Or you can wait 19 more levels for your suit of daedric armor which will weigh 81 lbs from skill level 75-99 heavy armor not including the repair hammers you keep with it, reduce your spell effectiveness, reduce your stealth until 75 sneak, and degrades mid-combat with use.

[@arcanefeline]

I wish there were more enchanted clothes options in Oblivion, and that the robes would not take up two armor slots. Armor is cool and all, but pure mage is my go-to charscter concept, so having more attire options would be great. Of course, there is ehcnanting, but I'd like more unique enchanted cloth items.

[@theoldknight85]

yeah, the lack of gloves is a bit of a crazy oversight. And robes should either be extra that you can't wear over armor or just count as a shirt

[@arcanefeline]

@theoldknight85 oh wow, I completely forgot about the gloves! It's three armor slots, then. Gloves, shirt, and pants are replaced by the robes. Morrowind's clothing system was way better.

[@theoldknight85]

@@arcanefeline I think Morrowind overdid it, that is just too many slots. The robes don't replace the gloves, there are actually just no non-armor gloves in the game except your starting wrist irons. You can get a second wrist irons from the Shivering Isles, but seriously they should just add cloth gloves.

[@ThatGamerDude9000]

Gotta ask the math teacher: you call these "reverse diminishing returns" when it comes to armor, wouldn't that be exponential returns/exponential growth? The basic formula is X = H * (100/(100-A)), where X is effective health, H is health, A is armor rating. At 100, your health is infinite (undefined in the formula, so I assume they tell the game to give you 0 damage). I assume at values over 100, they tell the formula to treat the armor value as 100. Derivative of that formula with regards to A (the rate of growth as A increases) would be H*100/((100-A)^2).

[@bronysaiyan5236]

And ofc shivering isle armor caps you at 85 when ur past lvl 22 i think. And armorer at 75 gives everything a 25% effectiveness increase aside from spells

[@Venator-711]

Its not 25% more stats its around 20%. Its only the durability thats increased by 25%

[@theoldknight85]

@@Venator-711 it is 25% more armor because its just a multiplier based on your armor health %. For weapons it is a 12.5% increase to damage, because the formula isn't one to one

[@Venator-711]

@@theoldknight85 thank you, math professor

[@HBon111]

Why is high movement speed so integral to your builds?

[@theoldknight85]

@@HBon111 honestly I’ve never even thought about this. I guess I’d rather be dead than slow. After a little thought, moving fast helps with dodging and fighting, but really it’s just more fun

[@SmokeGravity]

I actually have something to say about skyrims armor! Its fairly easy to get a 40% damage without hiccups or time investments The civil war champion quest :D Set of Daedric Armor basically as soon as you join either side (yes creation club way too op) just do the Civil War Champion quest 🥰 hit above 370 armor with the Storm bear set and just 2 perks in heavy armor and a simple stone flesh brings me to over 50% damage negation in my 5 hour save file 🥰 I also happen to have an amulet of talos, and 2 words of slow time 40% cooldown reduction is prettty sweet So- yeah im having fun being great at the game