Kab's Unleveled Spells

Kab's Unleveled Spells

Removes level-scaling from spells, in addition to some other magic overhauls.

Now on UESP! See https://en.uesp.net/wiki/DFU_Mod:Kab%27s_Unleveled_Spells

• []No level-scaling on spells. Fireball does the same thing at level 1 and at level 20.

  []Affects player spells, enemy spells (no more 20 rounds long paralyzis effects), and magic items - but not potions

  []Spell effect costs overhauled. The classic values were too expensive to leave intact without the crazy level scaling to abuse

  []Spell descriptions reworked to remove the "scaling" elements from the text, as well as other legacy mismatches between description and actual effect

  []Spell icons have been redone to have more diversity, and to more easily identify the element of an offensive spell (red=fire, yellow=shock, etc...)

  []Enemies have been given unique spells in order to keep the same power as classic, in most cases

• Compatible with your existing playthrough, if you're okay with wiping your entire spellbook and filling it up again

  Balancing spell power and cost has been in my sights since I released Skilled Spells, but the scaling part of spells ended up being not very interesting in the way it's implemented in Daggerfall. The difference in cost between a "+1" or a "+1 per level" is always going to have a tipping point where one is more "value-cost efficient" for your level, so low-level characters will take the former and high-level characters the latter. There's no point in mixing them, like you'd expect from a AD&D spell.

  So, this mod just removes the level scaling from spells, like the later Elder Scrolls games did. With this, I can just give the effect itself a cost: 50 damage is always worth 50 damage, 35% chance is always worth 35% chance. I couldn't just keep the classic values for spell effect costs - some spells would have just been completely unviable for what they do. So I redid lots of it to make expensive effects cheaper (I didn't make strong effects like Free Action more expensive yet, we'll see about that).

  But redoing all the spells to have a fixed strength also affects enemies. When I first tested my mod, the level 2 imps in Privateer's Hold would consistently one-shot me with Toxic Cloud, which now has its level 8 strength at all times. So, I've had to give all spellcasting enemies custom spells too: they should have the same average strength as classic, with the same range and element, except with maybe a bit less variance (ie: min damage higher, max damage lower). Class enemies (ex: Mages, Healers, Sorcerers, ...) all use the same spells as the player gets from the spell vendor, no cheating there.

  Since I was in the process of editing all the spells in the game, I also fixed icons and descriptions