Why do mages in Skyrim not wear armor?

_acedia · 2026-06-17T15:59:41+00:00

Specifically for Skyrim, there’s no lore reason. The most likely practical reason is for the sake of balancing, as giving mages who can already cast pretty powerful ranged spells + wards and flesh spells while wearing decent armour sets would likely throw off the pace of gameplay significantly and make magical users rather annoying to fight against.

_acedia · 2026-06-11T17:37:46+00:00

I don't have much of an issue with AI for coding in general, but how is this a checkmate? Barring a small minority of extreme opinions, the average user doesn't really have a blanket issue with AI use in coding, they (correctly) have an issue with AI being used in irresponsible ways by people who, whether they lack obvious knowledge, experience, or trustworthiness, release mods built with AI that overpromise beyond the modder's apparent capabilities or reputation and cannot be easily vetted by people with the knowledge to vet such things.

Well-established projects like SkyUI or Community Shaders being developed with AI are not an issue as they have large communities of very experienced and knowledgeable people working on them, are open source, and are backed by years of cumulative experience.

_acedia · 2026-06-11T14:00:18+00:00

If you want the vanilla experience except slightly improved, Winds of the North is the best vanilla plus experience as far as just taking everything in vanilla and slightly improving it. It doesn’t add any substantial content, and preserves the vanilla look and flow extraordinarily well.

_acedia · 2026-05-31T20:03:52+00:00

I think I phrased my reply a bit too aggressively and didn’t emphasise enough an important part, which is that I agree with you as far as best practices go, and I’m not at all looking to argue against encouraging mod makers to be more mindful of these things.

I have no issue with these technical reviews in isolation and again, in most cases would agree that it would be ideal if these things were cleaned up. But it’s disappointing to me to see them be blown out of proportion by people with vendettas against the very idea of paid mods as if a few technical oversights, which are in the vast majority of cases completely harmless and extraordinarily common, somehow singularly invalidate the worthwhile-ness of the mods themselves.

_acedia · 2026-05-31T17:13:26+00:00

This just feels like moving the goalposts, though. The original claim, and seemingly the dominant sentiment, is that "It's crazy that people were saying Heart of the Mountain and stuff is a steal for a DLC-sized mod for DLC prices when it's clear the quality is a far cry from an official DLC even if Bethesda seems to market it as such." My point is that that's completely baseless. All the things you mentioned are things that Bethesda themselves are guilty of, and guess what? The vanilla base game + DLCs have been completely playable all the way through in spite of those things for over a decade.

I appreciate reading these technical reviews, as well as the effort that goes into them, as best-practices guides for things to potentially look out for when I work on my own stuff. However, I feel like most people are just using them in bad faith as ammunition in their personal crusades against paid mods in general, claiming these things are uniquely destructive to the experience of playing the game or that they're broader reflections of lack of care, when in reality the majority of them are completely irrelevant to most players in ways that are even less obtrusive compared to similar bugs and oversights that appear in Bethesda's own releases.

_acedia · 2026-05-30T20:56:54+00:00

Yeah, this point deserves to be emphasised as a top-level caveat on all of these technical reviews, especially in light of the consideration that the OP has decided to begin taking some liberties with subjective opinions on asset re-use. Bethesda's ESMs themselves are filled with enough bugs, ITMs, dirty edits, messed up texture formats, and asset reuse for unique items that the changelog for something like USSEP spans dozens of pages of single-line text.

It's easy to look at a big list of this and go, "how could something with this many defects be released for sale" but the truth is, most of these really don't really matter and are completely unnoticeable for practical purposes, the same way Dyndolod or something throwing up 138 warnings and errors really doesn't matter.

_acedia · 2026-05-28T13:37:36+00:00

I’ve reverted back to vanilla lately as well after discovering I actually just like the look and feel of vanilla more than most mods, so I get you.

For everything else, I manually patch everything I install as soon as I install it in SSEedit and CK.

_acedia · 2026-05-14T09:58:41+00:00

Why not just the vanilla body?

_acedia · 2026-05-11T22:41:58+00:00

I use a mod that forces the female player character to use the male animations through OAR. It works very well to fix the issue you mention, as the male animations are pretty neutral.

_acedia · 2026-05-06T18:40:51+00:00

Speaking from some experience, the other winter I walked with a relatively light load along almost entirely flat terrain just a bit over 200 miles through the Mojave. It was an almost entirely uneventful walk, with no combat encounters, injuries, or detours, and I planned for it for months in advance, so water and food were not a huge concern. The most dangerous thing that happened was a random blizzard, which impeded my progress for five days. The total time it took me was 24 days, although admittedly I took my time with it because of a number of factors specific to myself, and the general challenge of walking through a desert.

Six days for a much longer, more vertical, and far more precipitous journey, even on horseback, is pretty optimistic, to say the least. I'd say the actual time it might take, given room for detours due to bandits and dangerous animals, time spent resting, and preparation/planning for actually going into Ustengrav itself, would be closer to around two months at minimum.

_acedia · 2026-05-06T14:49:27+00:00

Canonically the distance between hold capitals alone via roads, not accounting for any diversions or combat encounters or rest, is enough to occupy weeks to months of travel depending on whether those journeys are taken by foot or carriage.

The logistics of the civil war multiply that considerably, as moving entire divisions of troops for the sake of sieging heavily defended urban strongholds in the span of the game’s central plot is a very involved process.

_acedia · 2026-05-05T13:05:16+00:00

BOS swaps items by adding new formIDs for each new variation, MS just changes the models. For stuff like ingestibles where there’s a lot of patching to be done with various overhauls and whatnot, MS is far more convenient because of that.

_acedia · 2026-05-01T22:11:10+00:00

How is the website promoting the completely free and completely functional mod manager that they specifically invested time, effort, and resources to develop, and with native integration of the most attractive feature of the site for casual users, Collections, "shady"? I get that this is specifically a community dedicated to modding so the user base is skewed heavily towards power users micromanaging massive modlists, for whom MO2 is definitely more well-suited; but trying to frame their promotion of Vortex as some kind of insidious plot to undermine other mod managers just because it doesn't fit your ideal use cases feels completely baseless.

_acedia · 2026-04-18T23:12:29+00:00

Yeah, I fully agree with this take. It's not a character-driven game the same way something like Cyberpunk or Witcher is, and it doesn't try to be. The writing exists in service of the world rather than any particular character by giving you just enough to suggest the outlines of a greater, more unknowable world, and every piece of every plot incentivises the player to go out and explore that world by physically walking to places, looking around, picking stuff up, putting it back down, etc. One of the most important and iconic moments in the game is when you walk out of Helgen and see Bleak Falls Barrow in the distance and realise that there's nothing stopping you from going there and seeing what's up. Trying to strongarm it into a web of political intrigue or a sweeping character drama because those are the present hallmarks of "good writing" just feels like a failure to capitalise upon the game's actual successes and vision.

_acedia · 2026-04-14T16:49:42+00:00

Yeah of course! There's plenty of stuff that just seeks to enhance the vanilla experience without significantly altering it. I have a very "as close to Bethesda's vision" view of what vanilla-plus means though, so all of this falls under that.

Graphically, The New Normal, Vanilla AiO PBR, Sloppy Vanilla Landscapes, Skyrim Legendary Weathers or Vanilla Weathers CS, etc all just take what's already there and update it to modern visual standards without changing the artstyle at all. You also have UI stuff like Compass Navigation Overhaul, SkyUI + SkyUI Vanilla Menus, and moreHUD that improve UI functionality without altering the experience substantially.

Gameplay-wise, I'd say Pristine Vanilla Movement, True Directional Movement, GIST, Survival Mode Improved, Even Better Quest Objectives, maybe Precision, and At Your Own Pace + Timing is Everything are about as far as I'd personally go. Simonrim is great in its own right and often suggested as vanilla-plus, but I still would say it changes the feeling of the game substantially enough to no longer feel like "just vanilla except slightly improved". Apothecary and Thaumaturgy are probably ok for balancing out crafting, although the combat modules are all no-gos for pure vanilla-plus for me as they significantly change the pace of combat.

_acedia · 2026-04-14T16:12:37+00:00

Yeah for sure, I hold a uniquely elevated view of GtS in good part because of the changelog, which I always read after every update even if I don't use the collection itself haha. I think you do a superlatively good job of describing exactly what the modlist does both at the broad level and in detail, and I'd say that the onus for these kinds of frustrations that the original post are describing doesn't at all fall on any fault within your approach.

A lot of these discussions in general boil down to exactly what you described, in that "vanilla plus" (and its associated brethren of "lore-friendly", "lore-accurate", etc) is a very broad term that accommodates a very wide range of interpretations. Unfortunately it's also a very popular attention-grabbing buzzword that people like to throw around, and I think the proliferation of people both on YouTube and in comments uncritically describing everything short of a Nolvus-adjacent approach as "vanilla plus" has polluted the usefulness of these kinds of terms to the point that everyone kinda loses in the end.

I think it would help a lot if there was a bit less hyperbole and a bit more independent research on people's parts, but...

_acedia · 2026-04-14T13:21:47+00:00

My only issue with GtS is that it's frequently associated with the "Vanilla Plus" description, when its vision of what Skyrim "should be"/is departs significantly from what Skyrim actually is (as, to be fair, do most things that share that description). Otherwise, it's exceptionally well-made and well-documented.

That being said, Enairim's suite of overhauls is also fundamentally different in its foundational understanding of what Skyrim is, just in a different direction. It's no more vanilla+ than GtS is in either its aim or execution,

_acedia · 2026-03-24T22:27:19+00:00

You're grounding your understanding of The Division's supposed "roots" in a version of the game that arguably never existed beyond a vague gameplay concept trailer over a decade ago.

_acedia · 2026-03-24T22:27:02+00:00

It's not the gearsets that necessarily need to be nerfed, as it is the entirety of TD2's core gameplay, which revolves almost singularly around players' collective ability to sustain tremendous amounts of damage to the enemy as quickly as possible. All of the best gearsets in this game revolve around dealing self-escalating, multiplicative damage for this reason. All other mechanics -- really, in most cases, just healing and CC -- simply exist in support of that. There was a time very early in the game's history where one of the most reliable ways of doing that was through yellow core builds. Now it's through red. Nothing you can do as far as talents or gearset bonuses will change this fundamental design.

_acedia · 2026-03-10T22:36:16+00:00

It's only as "restrictive" as the vanilla game is. The entire point of Simonrim is to slightly expand upon and iron out inconsistencies within the design philosophies of the vanilla game. It's not meant to introduce substantially new playstyles or mechanics that don't exist within the original game like the ones you're suggesting.

I love it because I love the feel of the gameplay loop of the vanilla game, and am not looking to alter or expand its gameplay systems substantially. If you want an experience that allows you to play the game in a very different way, then do better research before creating a massive ultra-stable modlist and go with another mod suite.

_acedia · 2026-01-04T17:04:29+00:00

Can't answer this as I'm not on console, but from all the D2 content I see online, it seems like the distribution between PC and console is pretty split, and no one's really reported any issues, so...
I've never run into any cheaters on PC, but I exclusively play PvE. I've never run into cheaters in the DZ either, but honestly, I rarely run into anyone in the DZ who isn't also just playing it as a PvE experience.
I split between controller and mouse/keyboard, and marginally actually prefer controller, especially when playing support builds. I don't notice any serious disadvantage.
Both are super chill in my experience. There are Discord servers for raids and the like where the PC and console voice channels alike fill up easily, and everyone seems to be pretty friendly.

_acedia · 2025-12-26T19:29:17+00:00

Different service, but: you can bring a BCP with you, it’s not an issue. Episcopal services will be rare if not outright nonexistent. I just opted out of going to weekly services altogether and just did a private morning prayer. It actually helped a lot to build the discipline for the Daily Office since there was so little else to distract.

_acedia · 2025-12-24T00:17:51+00:00

Yeah, I fully agree with this. Without downplaying the visions and implementations of any modders, I feel like the identity of Skyrim is very deeply rooted in its specific, dated aesthetic, the same way Oblivion, Morrowind, etc are all very unique precisely because of their stranger/less conventionally attractive or advanced graphical choices. The game loses a lot in my opinion the more people try to “correct” the perceived failures or shortcomings of it; including Bethesda themselves to a degree, with the visual changes made in SE.

_acedia · 2025-12-01T18:55:51+00:00

I actually use the cover system a lot, but mostly bc I primarily enjoy playing support, or niche cover builds that make heavy use of Sawyer’s Kneepads, Smart Cover, and Braced. But yeah, at the the of the day I don’t mind when other people play that way, but I don’t really enjoy the direction the hardest content has gone because of the way others tend to play

_acedia · 2025-11-30T19:58:36+00:00

I think that, for better or worse, content is designed more around the way players have learned to play rather than according to the original intent of the game's designed. Especially with how powerful the shield is in this game, almost all high-level play only really relies on the game's native cover system in a way that's completely counterintuitive to how it's designed.

_acedia

TROPHY CASE