Glancing Blows and Crits - MWSE

Main features:

- glancing blows replace misses

- crits are now a combat mechanic as well as a sneak mechanic

- weapon skills are still relevant

- little effect on combat balance

- applies to all actors, not just the player

- save game compatible

Many people dislike the original Morrowind combat system because constantly missing your target when you are aiming right at them feels unsatisfying. To many, it feels like something that should be in the control of the player. I agree with this opinion, but I also didn't want to replace it with a system that throws away dice rolling and/or completely rebalances the game. I was inspired by classic WoW's glancing blow mechanic to introduce glancing blows as a replacement for misses. I also added critical hits to regular combat which only exist for sneak attacks in vanilla. The end goal was to introduce all of this while maintaining the combat balance of original Morrowind.

What this mod does is remove the chance to miss and replace it with a chance to glance, which hits for half the damage of a normal hit. In addition, you have a chance to crit (equal to ((hit chance calculated by morrowind)*0. 1)^2) for 4x or 1. 5x damage for melee and ranged hits respectively. Sneak attacks always result in a crit. Combat skills increase at half the normal rate for glances, normally for hits, and 4x for crits. To maintain the vanilla combat balance, I included a balancing factor that ensures the player's average damage and skill-up rate is exactly the same as in vanilla Morrowind. What this means is that regular hits will do less damage and increase the associated skill less than in vanilla to compensate for the lack of misses and introduction of crits.

As you increase your weapon skill, more of your glances will become hits and crits, and more of your hits will become crits. When you max out your weapon skill, you will almost never glance, and most of your hits will be crits.

One potential problem is cast when strikes weapon enchantments, since they are now applied on every hit. This might make enchanted weapons overpowered. As of version 1. 2. 1, there is an option to turn this off in the Mod Config, but it has the side effect of causing some message box spam.

Lastly, I replaced the sound effects for glancing blows and crits with a hand-to-hand sound effect and the critical hit sound effect, respectively. The logic behind the former is that glancing blows are poorly placed hits with a weapon, and so would probably produce a more blunt, smacking sound effect.

Please let me know if you find bugs :)