Staff Overhaul Readme
v1.0

by Tekuromoto

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Introduction
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Staff Overhaul aims to improve many aspects of using staves in Oblivion. This first release has a number of basic features:

- enchant staves with long-range (on target) or personal (on self) effects
- disenchant staves (and other magical items) so they can accept a new enchantment
- improve your magic skills while using a staff
- vendors sell unenchanted staves that you can enchant

Of course, all of the features are configurable and optional.

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Requirements
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Staff Overhaul was developed with OBSE v19beta3, and requires at least this version of OBSE. If you are not comfortable using the beta version, please wait until OBSE v19 final is released before installing Staff Overhaul.

OBSE: http://obse.silverlock.org/

Staff Overhaul was developed with Oblivion 1.2.0416, OBSE v19b3, Wrye Bash 287 and over 200 installed mods (Fran's, MMM, COBL, body replacers, Race Balancing Project, LAME, nGCD, Progress, All Natural, Better Cities, Unique Landscapes, quests, you name it). It should work fine with any mod setup, however, read the Customization section for notes on specific mods.

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Installation
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I suggest using Wrye Bash's BAIN feature for installation. Just drop the archive into your Bash Installers directory and select it in the installers tab. If you prefer to install manually, unzip the contents of the archive to your Oblivion\data\ directory. Once the files are in place and the .esp is activated, simply fire up Oblivion (with the OBSE launcher, of course). The position of the esp in the load order should not matter: everything in the mod is new and no vanilla items are changed. A new vendor chest is added to Rindir's Staffs in the Imperial City to allow for the sale of unenchanted staves, and this should not conflict with any other mods (and is in fact the "best practice" for adding items to existing vendors).

Uninstallation
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Staff Overhaul can be safely uninstalled without losing any enchanted staves: these items are saved in the save game file the same as any custom enchanted item, new potion, etc. However, you will lose anything in the disenchanting rescue chest (see Troubleshooting, below), so be certain that you don't need anything in that chest before uninstalling.

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Features and Usage
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Enchanting a staff
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Enchanting staves works like enchanting any other item: proceed to an anchanting altar or use a sigil stone and follow the usual procedure - don't worry that the enchantment reads "on strike" at this point. Upon closing the enchanting menu you'll be asked if the new staff is to be used at long range or on yourself, and the enchantment will be adjusted accordingly. If you're using a mod that lets you get enchanting services through an NPC then this message will only pop up after you leave the dialog with the NPC, and ***only for the most recently enchanted staff!*** If you're using this method to enchant your items, don't enchant multiple staves in one transaction - only the last one will work properly and you will lose you enchantment on the other staves the next time you load the game.

This allows you to enchant staves with multiple on-target enchantments (weakness to fire plus fire damage, for instance) or with spells that you can cast on yourself (light, shield, healing, etc). Unfortunately, using a sigil stone (or similar item, ie Exnem's Runestones) will only allow you to use the "on strike" effects of the stone - the personal buff effects cannot be pulled from the stone for use in a staff.

Staff skill gain
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No special effort on your part is required for this part of the mod. Simply ready a staff (any staff, from any mod) and fire away. If it's enchanted with a destruction effect, your Destruction skill will go up. A healing staff will boost your Restoration ability with use. The amount of skill you gain is configurable; see Customization, below.

Only the first magic effect on a staff counts towards raising your magic skill; if you are making a staff with enchantments from multiple magic schools you should keep this in mind.

Disenchant spell
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Upon starting the mod you'll be given a lesser power that allows you to remove the enchantment from any enchanted item. Simply cast it and place the desired items into the container that opens. You'll be prompted to confirm disenchanting of any quest or scripted items. Unenchanted items will be returned with no effect. The original enchanted item will be replaced with an unenchanted copy, and the original will be stored in a safe place just in case (see Troubleshooting, below).

Buying unenchanted staves
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Rindir sells a few unenchanted staves at his shop in the Imperial City.

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Customization
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Most of Staff Overhaul's features are customizable, including the option to remove the feature altogether, via the included file "DS Staff Overhaul.ini". The mod looks for this file in both the data\ini\ and data\ folders, with the former taking precedence. Also, if you prefer to have different settings for different characters, you can append " - Character Name" to the filename and the mod will use it in preference to the default file. So if your character's name is Claudius Decius, the mod will look for "DS Staff Overhaul - Claudius Decius" in data\ini, then in \data, then will look for the default file. If no valid file is found, the mod will use the default values.

Staff skill gain
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If you do not wish to use the skill gaining feature at all, set StaffSkill to 0; the default is 1.

In order to set StaffSkillUseMode and StaffSkillUseMult properly, it's necessary to understand a bit about how skill use works in Oblivion. Magic skills have two types of actions that you can perform to increase your skill and each action increases your skill by a defined amount; the two actions are casting the spell and having the spell affect the target. In vanilla oblivion, the first effect (casting) gives you no skill; you only gain skill if the spell affects the target. Some mods may change this arrangement, notably mods that affect how you gain skills for levelling. I personally use tejon's Progress, which makes it so you always gain a little bit of skill for casting but the bulk of skill gain is still from having the spell affect the target (so you still get a smidgen of skill for fireballs that miss, for example).

StaffSkillUseMode has three settings: 1, 2, or 3. Setting to 1 give you skill gain based on the value for the first action, setting to 2 gives you skill gain based on the value for the second action, and setting to 3 gives you skill based on the sum of the values for the first and second action. The default setting is 3. The chart below gives examples for three popular setups:

Skill gained from | Recommended
Action 1 | Action 2 | StaffSkillUseMode
Vanillanone|all | 2
OOO/FCOM none|all | 2
Progresssmall %% | large %% | 1, 2, or 3

StaffSkillUseMult lets you specify the amount of skill you gain vs. a normal casting of a spell of the same school. The default is 0.2, which means you gain 20% of the experience you'd normally get from casting and/or hitting with a spell of the same school as the first effect on the staff.

Disenchant spell
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Setting DisenchantSpell to 0 lets you opt not to use the disenchantment function of this mod. Do this if you prefer to use a similar function provided by another mod, or if you simply don't want to be able to disenchant items.

Unenchanted staves
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Set VendorsSellUnenchanted to 0 if you don't want Rindir to sell unenchanted versions of staves.

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Troubleshooting, Q & A
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Staff Overhaul should be compatible with all mods. In particular, steps were taken to ensure compatibility with:
- TheNiceOne's Enhanced Economy and the item removal/tracking functions of that mod
- tejon's Progress, and any other mod that lets you tweak your skill gains

"I accidentally unenchanted a quest item/a scripted item/the wrong item/my favourite item and now my game is ruined!"
- Have no fear. You can retrieve the original enchanted items by opening the console (~ key) and entering "startquest DSSORescue". A container with all your enchanted items will open and you can take back the one(s) you need. Yes, you can cheat like this. You can also cheat in a gazillion other ways with the console. Knock yerself out.

"I'm using the skill gain ability, set to gain the same amount of skill as a normal casting, but my skill's not going up at the same rate."
- Check your settings. To be extra safe, StaffSkillUseMode should be set to 3 to cover all possible tweaks that mods might make to the skill use settings. Keep in mind, if you're using a function like Progress' Magicka-based Skill Progression, that you're not using magicka with the staff so skill gain may be less that a normal casting no matter what.

"I enchanted a bunch of staves with an NPC enchanter, but only one of them works properly."
- This was mentioned above: if you use a mod with any kind of "NPCs-can-enchant-items" feature make sure that you exit the dialogue menu (not just the enchanting menu, go right back to the main game window) each time you enchant a staff so that the "ranged or personal" menubox pops up for each staff, otherwise things will go awry.

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Future Plans
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I'd love to expand this mod and make it truly an overhaul for staves:
- visual magical effects on staves, similar to the flames on fire damage enchanted swords, etc
- more versions of unenchanted staves to buy (new models and textures)
- have more merchants sell unenchanted staves, and perhaps have them available as loot
- option to have staves (and/or other charged magic items) automatically become unenchanted ("dead") when they run out of charges
- option of not being able to recharge staves and/or other items (basically, they become temporary reservoirs of magic that eventually go kaput)
- option to have disenchantment of items available for a price through NPCs (in addition to or instead of the player spell)

Some of these simply require some scripting and are likely to happen with the next version. Others require new models and textures which I have no skill/experience with, so I'll have to use the work of others (with their permission of course). And my primary desire, the visual effects, probably won't be possible without new OBSE functions (if at all).

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Legal and Contact
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I made it, it's mine. That being said, go ahead and do whatever you want with it so long as I get some credit for the work that I've done. Thanks!

If you need to contact me for whatever reason, you can PM me on the official Elder Scrolls forums, where my handle is Tekuromoto.
You can also visit the RELz thread here: http://forums.bethsoft.com/index.php?/topic/1114725-relz-staff-overhaul/
And of course, this is the TESNexus download link: http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=34468

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Credits and Thanks
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Trollf for Armamentarium and Artifacts, where I found great looking staves that I wished I could enchant on my own.
Team Arma - Corepc, Lilith, Vacuity, Dev_Akm - who made Armamentarium usable in my game.
J3X for the idea of a disenchant spell.
SkyRanger-1 for the idea of the staff skill.
tejon for Progress, and all his other great mods.
TheNiceOne for Enhanced Economy, and making it easy to integrate with.
Cliffworms for his Morrowind Style Enchanting and Spellmaking, letting me forsee and prevent a potential problem for other users.
The OBSE team for continually improving OBSE. This is one of many, many mods that wouldn't exist without it.
Bethesda for providing the tools to improve their awesomely open-ended game.
The folks on the BethSoft forums for being overwhelmingly supportive, both of me and modders in general.
And finally my wife, for just being great.