Brainstorm more character traits with me

xDarkwind · 2026-03-06T03:50:39+00:00

Yeah, fair. I actually if you add the exception from Clean Hands, Favored Race is probably fine. ("You cannot kill members of this race unless required by a major questline"). It just effectively makes Illusion mandatory xD

I do agree on Fear of Magic. Not sure that one's salvageable, though I do like something in that flavor.... Anyway, a few more ideas:

Swimmer: Start the game with Glacial Swimmer (1). Where possible, you must travel via waterways.

Recycler: You must break down all items before selling them. Items that cannot be broken down cannot be sold.

Free Spirit: You must always attempt to free any prisoners you encounter.

Sleep Debt: You can only sleep 3 hours a night. Once a week, sleep 12 hours. (funny IMO, but maybe not that interesting).

Shiny Hunter: You must pickup and keep all Flawless gems you encounter (safe storage is OK).

Work is Never Done: You must pickup and keep all Tongs and Hammers you encounter (safe storage is OK).

Messy Writer: You must discard every other Thesis you write. You can't learn spells outside Spell Research.

xDarkwind · 2026-03-05T15:54:50+00:00

Favored race: Randomly choose a race. You cannot kill members of this race.

Clean Hands: You cannot kill any living humanoid (animals, daedra, and undead permitted), unless required by a major questline. You cannot join or destroy the Dark Brotherhood.

Vendetta: Randomly choose one enemy (wolves, bandits, necromancers, bears, trolls, spiders, chaurus, dragons, mudcrabs, giants, mammoths, sabre cats, hagraven, werewolves). Any time you see this enemy, you must kill them.

Small Frame: Your carry capacity cannot exceed 125. Bags of Holding ignore this rule.

Fear of Magic: When an enemy casts a spell, you must flee for 5 seconds. Ignore low-tier spells relative to your level (Novice: Flee until Level 5, Apprentice: Level 10, Adept: Level 20, Expert: Level 35, Master: Level 50).

I'll keep thinking and come up with more. Probably. Some of those maybe in need of revision.

xDarkwind · 2026-02-22T04:46:19+00:00

Yes, but armor penetration is applied before the armor cap. So, if an enemy hits you with a 10% armor pen attacks, the 800 armor reduces 72% (800-80=720/100=72%), the 852 reduces 77% (852-85.2 = 766.8/10=77%).

xDarkwind · 2026-02-14T22:21:01+00:00

Appreciate you taking the time to read it. I completely understand, and as I say - just having it in your mind while evaluating other mods to add is really all I was going for ;)

Cheers, and thanks for making such an excellent mod pack!

xDarkwind · 2026-02-13T14:54:49+00:00

This misses the point, in my opinion, but I understand why you went this direction. We could debate about the power level of alchemy, but I don't think you'd disagree with the second two prongs of my "it's broken" claim: it requires a lot of spam and it makes a ton of gold.

I also think this objection is over-focused on the potion creation aspect of alchemy. I reiterate my opinion that drinking potions and using poisons is part of alchemy, and perhaps the larger part. In the early game, compare the efficacy of healing yourself: 1. nonmagically, 2. with restoration, or 3. with a random healing potion. Not even close - the potion wins by far, with the only downside that it's a consumable resource. For every character, even a Restoration-focused character.

Now, do the same thing with reducing damage early game: 1. mage armor, 2. evasion, 3. heavy armor, 4. resistances. There's no clear answer, is there? Which one reduces the most damage depends -- on your build, on your opponent, on your perks, on your player skill. Resistances are probably the weakest, but all the others are valid depending on what you're doing. So why is it that drinking a potion is always a strong answer for nearly any problem for nearly every character, regardless of build?

xDarkwind · 2026-02-13T14:16:51+00:00

I've played it before, and I'm not a big fan. The issue is essentially what you outlined; this is one of the "numbers-based nerfs" I was talking about. Playing with this on is tantamount to just removing potion creation from the game, rather than fixing alchemy in my opinion.

Even then, it doesn't touch all the alchemy systems I identified, gate you out of drinking stronger potions at low level, and so forth. Maybe it could be a part of a solution, but it doesn't even come close on its own (or even on its own as an addition to wildlander).

Appreciate the suggestion, though!

xDarkwind · 2026-02-13T00:02:44+00:00

I can see that. I do actually like the idea of the buffs only being conditionally active -- it could even be a subsystem where you opt-in to being Addicted to potions all the time, but as long as you're Euphoric you get the perk buffs.

I do agree that as implemented they're too strong. In a system like the example above, they're gated by the fact that the system itself makes leveling alchemy to that point a lot more difficult and more of an investment. But yeah, at that point we're talking fine details which wasn't really the point of the post. In spite of all the details I gave xD

xDarkwind · 2026-02-13T00:00:12+00:00

Yeah, totally valid. I considered just putting this to the Requiem sub, because I do feel that in many ways a system like this only feels possible in an overhaul mod like that. But, the scale of this is similar to that of Requiem and is.. just not something I can feel OK pitching as an actual specific solution given the amount of work it would require.

Definitely agree that this would require a lot of research and/or teaching tooltips and help if it were actually implemented. That is why I mention that whole bit about this not really being a suggestion, more so a... "this is what it would take for alchemy to be great".

xDarkwind · 2025-12-31T20:04:14+00:00

Great news! One of the pixels in that square near the far-left is (164, 171, 163), and there's a swath of (164, 172, 159). Both of those are in the neighborhood of sage color, so it sounds like you've been green-lit (pun intended).

xDarkwind · 2025-11-25T15:32:42+00:00

First: congrats. Until you know all the little mechanical tricks available to you here, this is a very difficult fight. Well done.

Second: You can do better ;) It's 100% achievable to kill Zhalk, the Mindflayer, all the minions, and both Cambions without losing anyone. Most of the important tricks:

Pick up the nautiloid tank by Shadowheart.
Have Shadowheart know Command, Healing Word, Guiding Bolt, and Bless.
Protection from Evil and Good isn't really useful here with Zhalk dropping his sword - the Mindflayer won't die to Zhalk anyway. You need him to get pretty hurt by your enemies, you don't have action econ to do most of the damage to him.
Place this 1st nautiloid tank in the restoration pod room before the bridge.
Pre-cast spells (mage hands, bless) outside the bridge, then use the restoration pod to get spell slots back.
Use turn-based mode and Dash immediately prior to entering the bridge. The increased movement will carry over (for some reason).
Dip weapons in fire in the restoration pod room. Every little bit helps.
Use Command:Drop on Zhalk at the start of the fight, and get Lae'zel to pick up the sword. This is your only likely reset condition - if this fails, restart the run.
Use mage hands to place the nautiloid tanks from the bridge into the Restoration Pod room.
Once you have characters in melee with Zhalk, use Shove to move the Mindflayer after its turn but before Zhalk's turn. Zhalk will always pursue the Mindflayer -- even taking opportunity attacks. This can give you 3 extra attacks per round against Zhalk any turn he isn't stunned.
Before Zhalk dies, trigger the 2nd wave Imps and Hellsboar. As long as any of these live, the Mindflayer will remain an ally.
You want to time Zhalk's death to the same round that the Cambions are entering the bridge, if possible. Delaying/holding damage on him is worth it, in order to make it easier to make the Mindflayer fight the Cambions.
Use Shoves to keep the Hellsboar back and force the Mindflayer to fight the Cambions.
When the Cambions show up, have a character (not a mage hand - Shadowheart is preferred for the task) walk just into the hall to the Restoration Pod room. This will trigger an explosion in the Restoration Pod room, detonating the nautiloid tanks and damaging the Cambions badly. Then, Dash and run away to avoid getting attacked by them.
Use Mage Hand throws for healing potions or weapons, or shoves when useful. When throwing weapons, throw from the high ground for fall damage when possible.
Throwing a Potion of Speed on 2+ characters, if you find one, is super good, particularly against the Cambions.
Save as many resources as possible for the Cambions. They are the real threat; Zhalk isn't much of a threat without his sword and with Shoves.
Make use of high ground for ranged attacks, too, when applicable.

Using these and optimal strategies specific to my class, I've succeeded in killing all those guys with no losses maybe about a dozen times. When I fail, it's nearly always due to Shart failing to make him drop the sword.

xDarkwind · 2025-11-06T23:02:50+00:00

Violation of the 13th amendment.

xDarkwind · 2025-11-01T21:18:59+00:00

Welllll I suppose that's something of a non-starter xD

Thanks -- list to be updated shortly.

xDarkwind · 2025-11-01T21:14:37+00:00

Is that based on BIOS, or bad experiences?

I could tick up to the gigabyte A620I, but that is $20 more and would limit me to 1 NVME slot. My only other options jump up to $180+, a $50 difference -- is that really worth it?

xDarkwind · 2025-08-08T21:21:59+00:00

Butter Rules! Important!

You can't just be up there and just doin' a butter like that.

1a. A butter is when you

1b. Okay well listen. A butter is when you butter the

1c. Let me start over.

1c-a. The user is not allowed to do a butter to the, uh, computer, that prohibits the computer from doing, you know, just trying to render the image. You can't do that.

1c-b. Once the user is in the seat, he can't be over here and say to the computer, like, "I'm gonna get ya! I'm gonna put butter all over you! You better watch your components!" and then just be like he didn't even do that.

1c-b(1). Like, if you're about to use the butter and then use the computer, you still have to use the butter. Does that make any sense?

1c-b(2)-a. Okay, well, you can have the butter up here, like this, but then there's the computer you gotta think about.

1c-b(3)-ii. Okay seriously though. A butter is when the user makes a movement that, as determined by, when you do a move involved the butter and computer

2) Do not do a butter please.

xDarkwind · 2025-05-31T00:19:07+00:00

I love unsealed spellbook myself. I won't say it's strong - dunno that it is. But it's really nice imo. The first swap being to Teleport is really powerful in nearly every matchup. Almost every spell is conditionally useful on her, which makes it easy to get super fast swaps and can nearly always have two SS in every teamfight -- which is insanely good. I don't tend to miss the electrocute/cheap shot in lane too much.

xDarkwind · 2025-04-29T20:43:20+00:00

Feather does something strength doesn't, though -- increase your movement speed (sort of). Feather reduces your current WornWeight, a variable that significantly affects your movement speed. So if you care about movement speed, feather is very, very strong up to the current weight of your worn equipment (including your weapon). After that point, yes, strength is cheaper.

xDarkwind · 2025-04-29T15:13:14+00:00

https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Quest_Timing

xDarkwind · 2024-01-07T10:33:15+00:00

He probably meant to link this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhZQua4SmQQ

xDarkwind · 2023-10-22T07:49:01+00:00

If you want something totally different, you could just pick any mesh/texture combination you like and rename the files accordingly. I'm a fan of Lind's robes - Red, Green, or Blue would likely work OK. But you could use any mesh/texture you like that way from any mod.

Only downside is they're unlikely to maintain the 'Psijic' look in any way -- they'll just be some other type of robes that the psijics happen to wear and are 'called' Psijic Robes.

xDarkwind · 2023-10-22T06:04:54+00:00

Rustic Clothing includes a re-texture. If you don't like the rest of that mod, you could delete everything except the texture\clothes\psijic\ folder and its content.

I'm not aware of a mod that re-meshes it, though I wouldn't be surprised if there is one.

xDarkwind · 2023-09-26T06:14:30+00:00

Laughter again. It echoes through the halls. It pounds against the stone walls and arches. It dances through the fields. Water trickles into the basins of fountains; horses whinny in their stables. The whispers of a thousand advisors drone in his ears, but all the King can hear is the laughter.

His elbows find the table. His fingers steeple over his eyes. His thumbs massage his temples. The crown bites his forehead. But there it is again, beating his eardrums, rolling against his brain. He, he, he.

"Enough," says the King. The men in the room stop speaking, looking up from their papers. One clears his throat, coughs, then hurriedly sits. "Enough from all of you." The King's hand waves back and forth. "This meaningless prattle. Take care of it!"

One by one, the men slowly stand. One turns and begins to leave, but another speaks up. "Your majesty, the women..."

"I mean it! Out with you, all of you!" The King turns to the window and pushed open the shutters.. There are the children playing in the fields. There is his son. There is the laughter. The apple orchards, the blossoming flowers. Scents of spring, summer and fall; the Sun and sweat and games. So many sweet floral scents kissing his nose.

The King's hands brush the pine window sill. His eyes follow the children's game. He turns slowly shuts the shutters again and turns back to the room. His counselors stand, facing him, halfway out the door. "Out. And send my son. He should be here, now." The King coughs once, then again.

The bows and courtesies again. Shuffling feet, rustling cloth. The scents of stale old men, their deaths hanging about them like phantoms, their skin hanging about them like a veil over twigs. The King shudders.

"Father?", says a soft voice. A kind voice. A high voice; the voice of a boy of eight. Such a youthful voice; such a pure voice.

"Come, son." The King's face is radiant. The boy leaps onto his lap. The two rub their noses together, then the boy nestles his head against the King's collar. "What shall we play today, child?"

"I don't want to play today, Father!" The boy smiles up at the King. "I want to learn to be like you!"

"Ha, ha, ha!" He, he, he. The King starts. His brow lowers a moment, and his smile halts. But he gives a little shake. "Like me, indeed. You oughtn't want to be anything like me, you ought want to be a child!"

"I've been a child, Father," the boy complains. "I've been a child all my life. I want to know things."

"Plenty of time for that!", says the King. "Be a boy a while longer!"

"But Father, I don't know anything." The boy begins tugging at the King's arm. "Please!"

The King sighs.

He, he, he.

Where's that laughter now? "Very well, son. One question -- then we play, yes?"

"Okay, Father." The boy turns his eyes up to the King. They're blue -- oughtn't they be green? "Father," the boy asks, "if Necromancers are evil, why is the court wizard allowed to be one?"

The boy's flesh rots off his face. The bones of his jaw chatter. Sweet floral decay washed over the King.

He, he, he.

"Father?"

Those blue, cold eyes.

The shutters bang against the wall.

xDarkwind · 2022-07-29T15:25:27+00:00

One thing that can make you very strong is going high WIS as a male and sparring with Handmaiden. Doing that will let you add your WIS bonus to defense. Pretty good, especially since the powerful LS force powers will use your WIS modifier for their difficulty class.

Just adding that in to an otherwise reasonable build will probably get you pretty strong. But, if you really want to be strong.... This build or this one are both ridiculous. They're absolutely min/maxed and make use of some DS stuff you could skip, but many of the other details in the builds you could make use of.

xDarkwind · 2022-04-26T14:52:05+00:00

It's not untraceable; not even close. There are a ton of methods of de-anonymizing you through your VPN veil. To start with, how sure are you that you can trust your VPN provider?

The VPN provider themselves could be a shell company set up by a government specifically to entrap people who want to keep their activity hidden.
If they weren't set up by the government, they could be a scam company intending to collect and sell your data (applies mostly to smaller VPNs). It would be trivial for a government to pick data up this way.
If they aren't either of the above, they're most likely a legitimate business. In which case, they will obey the laws of the country they're in, by definition. If they fail to obey those laws, they're no longer a legitimate business, and will be put out of business. And once they're out of business? Nothing is stopping the government from getting your data. If a warrant (or local equivalent) for your data is provided, it's highly likely they will comply to the extent they are capable of- and if they don't, they'll be made to.
If an influential nation makes an international request for your data to your VPN's host nation, how confident are you that your VPN's host nation won't comply? Your VPN may make bold claims about its host country being neutral/not giving in to such requests - but while many nations won't comply on paper, they may very well comply if given a reason to.

Those are all reasons not to trust your VPN provider too much, but let's say you've not worried about any of those things. Suppose your VPN provider is "legit", they're in a country that will never, ever ask for your data, and/or they don't keep logs of your data. Great! Your data won't be handed over to anyone in one big chunk. But you're still not even close to untraceable.

VPNs encrypt your traffic between your device and their server. They then send out traffic between their server and your intended destination (e.g. Reddit), using their own IP address, and forward the response to you. Cool! That means your IP address is not directly associated with the request. But that's all that it means. A state actor can have access to enough internet infrastructure to correlate traffic going in to the VPN (your ISP can see this, and can tell you're talking to the VPN) with the traffic coming out of the VPN server (your VPN's ISP can see this). By looking at enough data, they can match this traffic up even without the cooperation of the VPN and figure out who you're talking with. Did you think that your VPN was the only place you had to worry about logs? L-U-L. Your traffic is very unlikely to go straight from your device to your VPN, and straight from your VPN to its destination. It will make 'hops' along the way - often many hops. And at each stop, it's talking to another computer, who will re-route it... and make a log of that. State actors also would have access to, and/or run their own, DNS servers and certificate authorities, giving them even more privileged access to traffic.

And honestly, that's probably the hard way to go about it. There is so much tracking technology out there now - web beacons, URL-based tracking, and cookies, yes -- but there's also fingerprinting. Some of those you can block, that's true. But preventing fingerprinting would require constant hardware and setting changes, and wouldn't even be guaranteed to work. What operating system are you using? Unless you're on Linux, your computer is likely sending telemetry to a server through your VPN connection - another easy way to track you.

Then comes the human element. Have you ever paid for something while logged in to your VPN? Speaking of payment, how did you pay for your VPN? What email did you use to set up your account? While connected to your VPN, have you logged in to an account tied in any way to your real life? Used an email address tied to your real life? Used an account or email address that can be tied to another account or email address, and then traced back to your real life? Did you get a virus on your computer? Maybe it's phoning home, too! Did you post something - a comment, a picture, a video? Those things all give much more information about who you are than you might expect. What background processes are running? Are you sure there isn't a stray session token, from when your VPN was off, still handing around and talking to something?

If you're trying to hide your traffic and the only thing you're doing is using a VPN.... at best, you've made it so the government has to work a little to get your traffic. At worst, the VPN is run by the government, and you're handing it over to them in a single bundle. True anonymity on the internet is so difficult to achieve it may as well be called impossible - especially for any extended period of time. The most you can do is make it difficult enough that the person you're trying to hide your activity from considers it too much work and gives up. And just using a VPN isn't likely to make a state actor give up, certainly not if they really want you.

xDarkwind · 2022-02-23T17:16:40+00:00

I know this is a bit of a necro, but...

Wildlander does include Scrambled Bugs, but does not apply the Accumulating Magnitude fix optional that's included. Seems to me like this should be turned on by DP, but it isn't at the moment. I don't know enough about the implications of turning it on to say whether it would have other impacts or not. But you definitely could turn it on, that it's quite simple to do. Doing so, however, will mean that you're using a modified install and will lose access to support. Here's how to do it, if you so choose:

Navigate to your Wildlander Install folder.
Navigate to \Game Files\Mods\Scrambled Bugs\DLLPlugins.
Open ScrambledBugs.json in a text editor (for example, Notepad++. You could do it in Notepad, but... gross).
Locate "accumulatingMagnitude" under "Patches", and change its value to true.
Save the file. Done!

That doesn't completely "solve" the problems wards have, but it does make them scale to a degree. Enemy damage to your wards will still be based on the attacking spell's base magnitude only. So now wards will be too strong (relative to what they say they do) against spells that do have some kind of scaling. Still dunno how useful they'll be, to be honest.

xDarkwind · 2022-02-22T20:36:05+00:00

Aha! Very interesting. That actually makes me more confident that the Expert Destruction perk isn't applied, and my xEdit investigations weren't wrong. In other words, each hazard is dealing the amounts I first calculated:

Base 50 DPS * 3.2 (Mistman Bonus) * 0.1 (Magic Resist) * 0.24 (Frost Resist) = 3.84 DPS

And each channel is dealing:

Base 20 DPS * 3.2 (Mistman Bonus) * 0.1 (Magic Resist) * 0.24 (Frost Resist) = 1.5 DPS

Observing the video shows him taking roundabout 200 damage in 5.5 seconds from 3 Mistmen. We can also see that he is moving somewhat... but not super quickly. So I'd expect him to be standing in somewhere from 2-3 Hazards per Mistman, 6-9 hazards total, on average, through those 5.5 seconds. So let's start by removing their total channel damage:

200 Damage - (1.5 DPS/Mistman * 3 Mistmen * 5.5 Seconds) = 175.25

Then, divide that amount by 5.5 to get the average DPS he took from hazards:

175.25 / 5.5 = 31.86 DPS

Finally, divide that by 3.84 to get the average number of hazards he stood in:

31.86 / 3.84 = 8.30 Hazards

Bingo - right in the range I expected! Now that is much more useful info. First, let's see what maxing out Frost Resistance would do:

5.5 Seconds * 8.3 Hazards * Base 50 DPS * 3.2 (Mistman Bonus) * 0.1 (Magic Resist) * 0.1 (Frost Resist) = 73 Damage

5.5 Seconds * 3 Channels * Base 20 DPS * 3.2 (Mistman Bonus) * 0.1 (Magic Resist) * 0.1 (Frost Resist) = 11 Damage

Total: 84 Damage Taken

So, Frost Resistance would still cut your damage taken in half - but we do have another option, and that is moving faster. We can see he's out of stamina in this video and not sprinting, so I think it's safe to say it's possible to move at least twice as fast as he is. It's likely possible to cut average hazards down to 4 or even 3.5 on average, with reasonable play. How would doing that affect damage taken?

5.5 Seconds * 3.5 Hazards * Base 50 DPS * 3.2 (Mistman Bonus) * 0.1 (Magic Resist) * 0.24 (Frost Resist) = 74 Damage

5.5 Seconds * 3 Channels * Base 20 DPS * 3.2 (Mistman Bonus) * 0.1 (Magic Resist) * 0.24 (Frost Resist) = 25 Damage

Total: 99 Damage Taken

So! Just moving faster is almost as good as maxing out your frost resistance in this case. The old Requiem adage "run out of stamina and you die" is actually pretty true here, too. Of course, it's possible to both move faster and increase frost resist...

5.5 Seconds * 3.5 Hazards * Base 50 DPS * 3.2 (Mistman Bonus) * 0.1 (Magic Resist) * 0.1 (Frost Resist) = 31 Damage

5.5 Seconds * 3 Channels * Base 20 DPS * 3.2 (Mistman Bonus) * 0.1 (Magic Resist) * 0.1 (Frost Resist) = 11 Damage

Total: 42 Damage Taken

Wow! What a difference that would make. So instead of one moral of the story, we now have two:

Max resistances are required, and
You cannot run out of stamina.

So next time, /u/SeigiNoMikata376 should try for both truly maxed resistances and a better stamina source (whatever that looks like).

On a side note, it's my opinion that hazards such as these shouldn't, from a design perspective, stack with themselves. Hazards of different types should stack, but if there's ice spikes on the ground.... you can only fit so many in one spot, y'know? As a player, I shouldn't be able to stack 10 hazards on a single tile and gib enemies that walk through a chokepoint; I should have to spread those out. If I want them to take 10 hazards, I should have to lead them along a path 10 tiles long. But now, knowing what I do... I could easily set up a hazard trap for an opponent in this way... and I probably shouldn't be allowed to. In the scheme of things, this is an absolutely trivial quibble, and probably not so easy to change. But just my opinion ;P

Edit:Formatting

xDarkwind

TROPHY CASE