MWSE Armor Tempering

Requires MWSE

Not compatible with OpenMW

This mod adds a "tempering" mechanic for the player, allowing you to use your armorer skill to improve armor. You can improve items to ebony-tier AR using raw ebony, glass-tier AR using raw glass, adamantium-tier AR using raw adamantium, etc. This means a skilled armorer can, for instance, improve their favorite Steel Cuirass to an ebony-strength item.

For (relatively) common materials like scrap metal, ebony, glass, each temper takes 10 ingredients (can be customized with the MCM). For rare materials like stalhrim and adamantium, each temper takes only one material. You can improve items to daedric tier too--this requires the strange magic found on cursed gems, ore, and daedra hearts found in Daedric ruins. If you pick up a gem and find it summons a daedra, you can use this cursed item to forge a powerful item! But there are only a few of these cursed items in the game, so use them wisely.

The formula for tempering is fairly simple. At armorer skill 100, you will be able to fortify your armor to the tier level relevant to the material you are using. At lower levels, you will get a benefit equal to the potential tier of the material scaling to your skill. For example, if you are trying to improve a dwarven item (AR 20) to ebony tier (AR 60) at armorer skill 50, you will get halfway there ( armorer skill 50=50%, rather than a 40 pt improvement you will get a 20 pt improvement) and produce an AR 40 item.

You can repeatedly temper items, so an unskilled smith can produce strong items with lots of materials, but with diminishing returns as they get closer to the material's maximum AR value.

Tempering will grant you some armorer experience too.

How to play

Place the item you'd like to improve in a work area, target it in your crosshair, and press alt-n to begin tempering.

You will be prompted to select an ingredient. Valid ingredients are:

Scrap Metal: Dark Brotherhood Armor tier (AR 30) (why not dwarven armor tier? because dwarven armor sucks! who wants AR 20 items, cmon dwarves smh)

Dreugh Wax: Indoril Armor tier (AR 45)

Raw Glass: Glass Armor tier (AR 50)

Raw Stalhrim: Stalhrim Armor tier (AR 50)

Raw Adamantium: Royal Guard Armor tier (AR 55)

Raw Ebony: Ebony Armor tier (AR 60)

Cursed Daedric Ingredients: Daedric Armor tier (AR 80)

Options

By default, armor types will be limited to the AR of the strongest armor of that weight class in the game. You can temper light armor with ebony, for instance, but it will never be stronger than glass, even though ebony is stronger than glass in-game. You can disable this via the mod's configuration menu, but this has balance issues.

Is this mod balanced?

If you are a purist who dislikes the idea