DETAILS OF REBALANCE

Below I’ll discuss some of the “behind the scenes” considerations involved in the rebalance. You may want to avoid reading this if you want to discover elements of the mod yourself; on the other hand, players that enjoy learning about the decision making process may enjoy reading more.

This rebalance’s intention was to raise the “floor” of magical items, particularly the “generic magic items” which populate the various shops and dungeons. In other words, I wanted to make sure that items like the Amulet of Mighty Blows didn’t have a value of only 15 septims. 

My rebalancing process essentially had two methods, the first I used for Weapons and Armor, and the second I used for all magical “clothing”, which includes the many rings, amulets, and belts. 

WEAPON AND ARMOR REBALANCING

For Weapons and Armor I located the UESP pages for the generic magic items ( EX https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Generic_Magic_Weapons), reviewed each item one at a time, and assigned the weapon a value of base item cost plus 125, 250, or 500 gold. 

Let’s consider two illustrative examples:

The Fireblade short sword that Sharn gra-Muzgob gives you before you venture into the  Andrano Ancestral Tomb is originally worth 25 gold. This is a ridiculously low price, because an unenchanted steel shortsword is itself worth 40 gold. In my rebalance mod it is now worth 135. (Ironically, I only now realize I made a mistake and the price “should” be 165, but this is actually an excellent illustration of a point I’ll return to later). 

Wayne’s Dwemer Jinksword is originally valued at 350 septims, only 50 more than an unenchanted example; this is an extremely useful weapon that a player could easily employ well into the end-game. Consequently, it’s rebalanced price is now 850 septims; so high that buying it would take considerable effort and sacrifice, and looting one would be a significant event.

The first method was much slower, but much more meticulous, the second method was much faster but less precise. I was slower and more meticulous with weapons and armor for several reasons:

First, they are already well balanced aside from their cost. Meaning, iron weapons have weak enchantments, steel enchantments have slightly stronger enchantments, etc etc. By viewing, for example, all of the generic magic short swords, you can see that the original developers clearly produced internally consistent tiers of magical power within the various weapon types. I wanted to maintain the careful work the original developers had already done, which meant I needed to carefully price the magical weapons and armor into defined strata based upon their base material and enchantment. 

Secondly, enchanted items and armor more individually significant to the player, because of their constant use and relative scarcity within the player’s equipment. What I mean is, a player is likely to only carry a few, or even just one, enchanted weapon, while also carrying a half dozen each of rings, belts, and amulets. Furthermore, a player “interacts” with their magical weapons constantly. For comparison, a belt that provides the Second Barrier spell is considerably powerful, as is an enchanted Dwemer sword, but between the two it is the sword that will constantly be visible on the player’s screen, used in every fight in a highly visible way. 
Thirdly, and not insignificantly, there is simply far fewer generic magic weapons and armors, and they have relatively “straightforward” enchantments; they mostly either deal some magnitude of elemental damage, or paralyse, or drain health, or (much more rarely) apply some other (generally not useful) negative effect. All this together made it far easier to balance each item carefully. 

MAGIC CLOTHING REBALANCING

Rebalancing the amulets, rings, belts, robes, and various other “enchanted clothing” would have taken much, much longer if I’d applied the above method. Not only are there a great many magic items, they have a bewildering variety of enchantments. Is the Divine Intervention spell more useful than Forty Strength? Is Summon Skeleton less useful than Slowfall?

So, I took a different method for rebalancing magical items: I opened the list, sorted by items they had enchantments, and looked for any price below five hundred septims and, when I found one, I increased the price by typing in enough 1s, 2,s etc into the value field to make it something vaguely reasonable based off a moment's consideration. 

For example, the Amulet of Balyna’s is originally valued at only 8 septims, a ludicrous price for an item of such utility. Now it costs 228 septims, because when I opened the item window and placed my cursor within the value field, it was easiest to pres the “2” key twice.

This is not a very exact method of pricing enchanted items, and players may find that they value this or that item more or less than my new price would suggest. This is perfectly fine; the purpose of the mod is, first and foremost, the make sure that magical items have some cost, generally of a few hundred septims, that make them buy and sell at rates more suited for both their utility to the player and their imagined significance within the game world. 

A final note; I did NOT rebalance the prices of any item already worth a thousand septims or more (I think there might be one or two exceptions I made before I reached this conclusion, perhaps a one glass weapon that was clearly cheaper than others by a factor of ten, something like that), for the following reasons

First, because such items are already worth many thousands of gold, which is a “good enough” price; they’ll fetch a fine price at a merchant whether they’re worth two thousand or twenty thousand. Secondly , while you feel a certain extremely powerful enchanted item should be worth more, or has a price inconsistent with some other similar items (ex: two different glass swords), this is a flavorful inconsistency: such magical items are extremely rare not often bought or sold, it makes some sense that their prices would be inconsistent. 

My concluding thought is that making mods is something anyone can do. If you download this mod, and feel that some particular item pricing needs to be fixed, don’t be shy! Simply download the Construction Set tools, open both the three MASTER files (Morrowind, Tribunal, Bloodmoon) and this plugin, then go find the item’s entry in the tabbed list. Change the file to whatever you want and then save the results, voila, you’ve modded it! If I can do it, you can do it, I genuinely mean that.