i think it might be 87.5% because legacy's spells are applied to the actor, not the race. and the interaction between racial abilities and actor effects might be multiplicative, i could never find any information about that on the CK wiki so i'm not sure. otherwise it's 75%. this is all before the resistance cap which is 85% in vanilla skyrim, and before any modulation from resistance mods like "resistances rescaled" which generally take points of resistance and scale the resulting percent resistance differently from vanilla.
So with this, Imperious and Legact will give all of their effects to the races? Or do you only include the abilities and the racial stat changes, and the passives are from Legacy?
I'm wondering because the way you word it, it sounds like it's mostly making both mods effects work at the same time, and the text to reflect that.
I'm looking for racial stat adjustments and some lightweight powers as the vanilla settings for these imo are not very good. Would I get exactly that using this and Imperious and Legacy? Or a literal merging of the two together, making some races have stacked benefits from each mod potentially causing balance issues?
so there are a couple different questions there. the first one is easy to answer, the second will take some time. first, will both mods' effects work? yes, that's true even without this patch. to understand why that is you'll have to read my answer to your second question, since it's a bit complicated. but yes, every single ability from imperious and every single ability from legacy will function correctly. as long as you use the legacy zEdit patcher correctly, every NPC in your game will have the effects from both mods, and your character will too. but that doesn't mean the NPCs will be able to use all the same abilities you can.
imperious and legacy use different methods to give abilities to actors. imperious edits the base race records, adding actor effects to the race itself. that means every member of a given race will receive that race's abilities. however, because imperious' active abilities aren't scripted, (it doesn't seem like you CAN script the use of racial actives) NPCs won't actually use them. only the player character can use them. and since the vast, vast majority of NPCs do not have the necessary perks (iirc they are called AlchemySkillBoosts, PerkSkillBoosts) to actually take advantage of skill bonus magic effects (e.g. fortify one-handed) the passive effects will be hardly noticeable either. so really when you use imperious it's mostly placebo, you just assume every other NPC has the same bonuses that you do, but theirs are extremely watered down in comparison to yours. that issue with abilities doesn't just affect racial passives either, it makes most alchemical effects and enchantments, and even some perks, do nothing to NPCs. fortunately the issue CAN be fixed with ASIS, or my preference, yet another zEdit patcher: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/13543
legacy works an entirely different way, it uses a hidden quest with scripting to make NPCs activate their abilities in certain conditions. it also does the same for players, so it has a pretty symmetric effect across the world. what i really like about it is that it activates your abilities for you; you don't have to manually trigger them, they are triggered by conditions, circumstances. but the only way to achieve all that is to cut out the middleman and just not bother with racial effects. all of legacy's effects are applied by actor effects. basically every NPC has to carry around a special perk connected to a quest that keeps track of conditions. the quest gives them new effects based on those conditions. but that means your entire load order needs to be patched so that every NPC of a playable race will have that perk added. so it requires a zEdit patcher. anyway, another advantage of this is that it doesn't conflict with other race overhauls. legacy only edits the actual race records so it can add all its unique effects to the racial descriptions. it edits the load screens too. so first off let me point out that if you're looking for active powers, legacy is not that. its powers are activated automatically based on conditions, they aren't actual spells that you can cast manually. but yeah if you combine imperious and legacy then you get a couple passives, a couple triggered abilities from legacy, and 1 or 2 active powers from imperious.
my goal in making this patch was just to make the descriptions consistent with a combination of the two mods. if your load order is legacy, imperious, then legacy patch, you don't actually NEED my patch. what will happen is legacy will edit the vanilla races, removing the racial abilities and adding its own descriptions. then imperious will overwrite that with its own racial abilities and its own descriptions. then the legacy patch will only touch NPCs. so you end up with imperious races, legacy NPCs. you get the base racial effects from imperious and you get legacy's per-NPC effects on top of that. my patch just makes the descriptions consistent and it overrides the races so that load order doesn't actually matter.
however i did think this through before i spent a few hours rewriting all the descriptions and load screens and stuff. first question was, as you put it, could it potentially cause balance issues. so i looked at each race's combination of effects in the best case scenario, like let's say all the triggered abilities happened to activate at once (unlikely but for the sake of argument) and you cast all your active abilities from imperious at the same time. what effect would it have? and when you add it all up together it's definitely more raw power than if you just used one of the mods alone, but 1) you also get drawbacks from legacy, 2) it's still not nearly as powerful as a lot of spells and perks you can obtain from other enaisiaion mods, and 3) each race is surprisingly equal in power. i noticed some races had some pretty OP powers like nords having so much frost resistance, but their other abilities kinda lock them into a certain playstyle. the more powerful triggered abilities activate less frequently too. i think legacy is amazingly well balanced on its own. adding imperious throws off the balance a little but it has its own limiting factors too. the passives in imperious just aren't that strong, and the active abilities tend to fall by the wayside. people just don't end up casting daily powers that often since the mechanic itself discourages using them.
something else i think is important to mention: none of the other race overhauls really provide racial diversity. the little stat changes they advertise on the description are actually meaningless. those are starting stat values. that's how much health/magicka/stamina a level 1 orc or high elf or w/e has. those racial stat differences do not affect how many stat points the races gain per level. just how much they start with. and the starting values are extremely low compared to what they reach within just a few levels. for the player character it's a flat 10 points per level, player's choice. for NPCs it's entirely decided by their class. a class has its own skill weights and attribute weights and when they level up they gain an amount of points in h/m/s proportional to those weights. so a level 20 orc bandit 2h boss will be almost statistically identical to a level 20 nord bandit 2h boss, within like 10 or 20 stat points, i s#*! you not.
so considering how incredibly equal the races already are (it's almost like bethesda is trying some politically correct subliminal messaging) it's very hard to imbalance the races. adding passives does a bit, and that zEdit patcher i linked above makes a big difference in race differences since it allows them to take more advantage of these passives. but it's only with legacy that you really start to see noticeable differences in how combat goes with an orc vs. with a high elf. and in my opinion those differences aren't like "wow the high elf was so much easier to kill." it's more like with know your enemy, if you've played that. which came from the same author, btw, he is very focused on game balance and does a great job of it. both mods massively increase the diversity of encounters but do a great job of making the net difficulty pretty equal. the differences you'll notice will be that high elves will be a lot better at magic and orcs will be a lot more dangerous at close range. and if you're a certain class with low magic resistance but a lot of heavy armor, your experience will be that it made orcs easier. but that's sort of the point, to add something like a pokemon type/element factor to the game. like a rock/paper/scissors dynamic.
so it definitely changes the game balance, it changes your matchups against different races. different classes will have different advantages and disadvantages against the various races. in my opinion the combination doesn't harm the game balance or make any race overpowered. the combination actually works really well together. and i'm not the kind of player who wants to combine like 3 different perk overhauls and 5 different spell mods and just go over the top with level 500 dragon boss battles. my favorite mods are the subtle ones. so if the result of this combination was garrish or extreme, i wouldn't have bothered making a patch for them. i first tested legacy just by itself, after having used imperious for some years. and i liked it a lot but i also liked imperious and already had made a lot of patches for it. so i went ahead and patched them and i'm really happy with the result personally. which is why i uploaded the patch for others to use!
ultimately it's a matter of opinion but i do think the combination is worth a try. legacy in particular is one of those mods that will change the way you play, and for the better. like you don't activate the abilities yourself, but you control the conditions that lead to them being triggered. so it's sort of like mechanics in an MMO, you're managing procs and it becomes part of your strategy. and it's a lot more pleasant to strategize around THAT than to worry about going into your inventory or setting up hotkeys so you can use an activated power that you can only use once. it speeds up the pace of the game. i would also strongly recommend combining it with know your enemy. the strategy with these triggered abilities combined with the strategy of managing elemental resistances and weaknesses, different armor types, etc. makes the game soooo much more interesting. i have tried a lot of combat mods that spice up the combat in other ways, adding rolling, hitstun, attack commitment, etc. but none of them really make it more advantageous to use strategy.
Legacy is definitely the main racial overhaulid like to use, but I plan on using Disparity (self ported) and it has a function that converts a races starting stats into a form of increased xp gain rather than just a starting skill bonus (which like you said, becomes moot).
Perhaps I didn't explain myself very well. I'll try and describe the desired effect I'm looking for and perhaps you could help?
I'm actually not a fan of Imperious racial passives, mostly for the same reasons you aren't. They really force the player into specific playstyles. That being said, I like the starting stats adjustments (this is a super simple change I can do on my own without the use of a patcher) as they mix very well with a mod that does what Disparity does and give them xp gain bonuses based on them. I'm also not against the idea of the player having access to the actual powers from Imperious as some of them are pretty interesting.
I guess the most efficient way of getting what I want (only the powers and stats from Imperious and the "passives" from Legacy) would to manually edit the race records each and remove the passives from Imperious as well as the descriptions altered to reflect Legacily passives instead of Imperious.
Looking for more of a combination of the two rather than a full on merge of them. Mostly to avoid some insane power combos as well as Imperious having rather bland and restrictive passives.
any plans to upload that? sounds like something worth trying. i'm all in favor of more racial disparities, whether that means scaling stat/attribute changes or different experience gain rates. im surprised that doesn't require a dll plugin. or does it not affect npcs? i think in order to change the effect of race on npcs' stats or attributes would require a netscript plugin or something similar just since the way npcs' stats are calculated (essentially, which skills and attributes they "level" with each level they "gain") is totally hard-coded, so you can only affect them by changing their skill weights which are determined by class, not race. i haven't looked into solving that problem but i do think it'd be possible with netscript framework. definitely way easier to change it for the player character though.
personally i don't think there is any combination of abilities from imperious + legacy that is overpowered. imperious' effect is honestly hardly noticeable except when you try to use frost spells on nords. legacy is pretty conservative. if it gives you a boost it's usually like 20% and it comes with an equivalent downside. i know my way around CK and xedit so if i noticed a problem or imbalance caused by the combination, i would just get rid of it or adjust it. and i do that for other mods all the time. i have like 600 plugins and more than half of them i've edited directly or patched. i spend more time modding the game than i do playing it honestly. so the fact that i haven't done anything to fix the racial balance is a pretty strong testament.
the only thing that i might change is nords' frost resistance. it's just way too much in my opinion. i have considered changing it many times. i originally wanted to change it to 5 or 10% and compensate for that by giving nords a perk that causes them to gain the full 50% frost resistance for 6 in-game hours after eating cooked food. and since i made a plugin that gives every playable-race NPC the alchemy and perk skill boost perks, this type of ability would actually affect NPCs if they ever managed to actually eat food within 6 hours of fighting. since NPC enemies don't eat food very often it would basically have the desired effect. players would get the lore-friendly frost resistance at their disposal, but you wouldn't be indirectly making "frost mage" a totally useless, non-viable build due to the massive prevalence of nords in skyrim. i still might do that, the reason i haven't is because i do think the frost resistance makes sense, and i haven't played a frost mage yet. i think if i made a frost mage character this would really bother me and that would give me the impetus to fix it. i just have a lot of other things on my bucket list, and that hypothetical perk would take a cool minute to develop and test.
but other than the frost resistance i don't really think there's anything in imperious that is too bad. on the one hand it does encourage you to pick your race based on your desired playstyle... or vice versa, if you pick your race first then your race kinda dictates your playstyle. i mean, you can play whatever you want, but i'm pretty sure everyone finds it stressful to be playing a race/class combination *knowing* that it's way less efficient than what they could be playing. it's just that pathological "best in slot" mentality where we try to min/max everything in video games. so i can definitely understand wanting to play without imperious or to get rid of its more polarizing passives. however i think legacy's abilities contribute to the same kind of stratifying dynamic that pushes the player towards a race's intended playstyle. i think that's inevitable. i mean if your goal is to make the races feel different to play and to fight, how do you do that? you have to make them better and worse at different things, which is inevitably going to effect what playstyles they're efficient at. skyrim tried to solve this by just making every race practically equal. no disparity at all. makes fighting NPCs way less interesting but at least nobody gets their feelings hurt when they try to play an aldmeri berserker.
imperious, legacy, and apparently (judging by your description) even disparity all do the exact opposite. they give each race some advantages and disadvantages that affect how you build the character. disparity might not make the high elf's physical skills worse but from the sound of it, you're saying it makes it harder for a high elf to level those skills than an orc? to me that sounds like it's even more restrictive. like now you're not just handicapped in terms of damage output but it takes you more effort to even progress? i think that makes perfect sense, personally, but it's definitely not super friendly to players wanting to use really counterintuitive race/class combinations.
but if you were able to port a mod to SSE then it sounds like you'll be able to sculpt whatever you end up with to your preferences. if you want to use legacy at all you still need to use the zEdit patcher. that's not like an optional part of the mod. also it sounds like you might have some misconceptions about what exactly it does. legacy does not have any passive abilities. everything in it is a triggered, scripted ability. all it does, period, is remove racial abilities altogether and add its own set of abilities through its own, totally separate system. so you aren't gonna be able to pick and choose abilities from legacy by editing the race records. all of its abilities are implemented through perks called by a script that's attached to a single "manager" perk. this manager perk does nothing unless you add it to an NPC. so you need the zEdit patcher to apply that perk to every NPC in the perk. this gives everyone the al_npc_perk which then checks what race they are and gives them a race-specific perk, which applies all the triggered effects. it does nothing without the patcher and it also has nothing really to do with the race records at all. the only reason legacy's plugin bothers editing the race records is to get rid of skyrim's vanilla racial abilities, since they kinda run counter to legacy's philosophy. it makes all the races themselves equal, so an NPC's stats and abilities will (at base) have nothing to do with their race until those perk abilities come into play.
i think legacy by itself makes for a really fun experience and balanced gameplay. combining it with know your enemy is even better. i just added imperious to the mix because i was looking for even more noticeable combat diversity. this is also the same reason i use that patcher i mentioned that lets NPCs be affected by enchantments, alchemy, and skill-boosting perks. if you used all that, minus imperious, and add this disparity mod, i think that will add up to a lot of dynamic and diverse combat. might even be too much for you, i know some people find know your enemy kinda overwhelming and to them i usually recommend running its patcher with a lower intensity value like 0.25. i personally stick with the default value. overall both mods, know your enemy and legacy, add so much to the game and ironically they both give the impression the author (a single person) thought them out way more thoroughly than bethesda thought out its own races and damage types and resistances and so on. from what i understand the author even did a literal study and statistical analysis of damage types, enemy types, average effectiveness and player opinions, while developing know your enemy. these 2 mods are just so well balanced. imperious definitely is not balanced to nearly the same extent, but it's still better than vanilla. and i think without any passives at all, it's just a little boring fighting humanoids. if you use know your enemy then you'll start to really notice how different it is fighting different enemy types. you really have to take advantage of the elements or weapon types because every enemy has significant resistances and weaknesses. but the humanoid races are all the same in that regard. legacy adds a lot of variation and most importantly the variation it adds is very noticeable because it's in the form of noticeable buffs that the enemies actually use. but it doesn't affect resistances or attributes that much so that's why i like imperious. it makes a humanoid's race just as relevant in how you fight them as know your enemy affects all the other races.
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I'm wondering because the way you word it, it sounds like it's mostly making both mods effects work at the same time, and the text to reflect that.
I'm looking for racial stat adjustments and some lightweight powers as the vanilla settings for these imo are not very good. Would I get exactly that using this and Imperious and Legacy? Or a literal merging of the two together, making some races have stacked benefits from each mod potentially causing balance issues?
Thanks for the clarification.
imperious and legacy use different methods to give abilities to actors. imperious edits the base race records, adding actor effects to the race itself. that means every member of a given race will receive that race's abilities. however, because imperious' active abilities aren't scripted, (it doesn't seem like you CAN script the use of racial actives) NPCs won't actually use them. only the player character can use them. and since the vast, vast majority of NPCs do not have the necessary perks (iirc they are called AlchemySkillBoosts, PerkSkillBoosts) to actually take advantage of skill bonus magic effects (e.g. fortify one-handed) the passive effects will be hardly noticeable either. so really when you use imperious it's mostly placebo, you just assume every other NPC has the same bonuses that you do, but theirs are extremely watered down in comparison to yours. that issue with abilities doesn't just affect racial passives either, it makes most alchemical effects and enchantments, and even some perks, do nothing to NPCs. fortunately the issue CAN be fixed with ASIS, or my preference, yet another zEdit patcher: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/13543
legacy works an entirely different way, it uses a hidden quest with scripting to make NPCs activate their abilities in certain conditions. it also does the same for players, so it has a pretty symmetric effect across the world. what i really like about it is that it activates your abilities for you; you don't have to manually trigger them, they are triggered by conditions, circumstances. but the only way to achieve all that is to cut out the middleman and just not bother with racial effects. all of legacy's effects are applied by actor effects. basically every NPC has to carry around a special perk connected to a quest that keeps track of conditions. the quest gives them new effects based on those conditions. but that means your entire load order needs to be patched so that every NPC of a playable race will have that perk added. so it requires a zEdit patcher. anyway, another advantage of this is that it doesn't conflict with other race overhauls. legacy only edits the actual race records so it can add all its unique effects to the racial descriptions. it edits the load screens too. so first off let me point out that if you're looking for active powers, legacy is not that. its powers are activated automatically based on conditions, they aren't actual spells that you can cast manually. but yeah if you combine imperious and legacy then you get a couple passives, a couple triggered abilities from legacy, and 1 or 2 active powers from imperious.
my goal in making this patch was just to make the descriptions consistent with a combination of the two mods. if your load order is legacy, imperious, then legacy patch, you don't actually NEED my patch. what will happen is legacy will edit the vanilla races, removing the racial abilities and adding its own descriptions. then imperious will overwrite that with its own racial abilities and its own descriptions. then the legacy patch will only touch NPCs. so you end up with imperious races, legacy NPCs. you get the base racial effects from imperious and you get legacy's per-NPC effects on top of that. my patch just makes the descriptions consistent and it overrides the races so that load order doesn't actually matter.
however i did think this through before i spent a few hours rewriting all the descriptions and load screens and stuff. first question was, as you put it, could it potentially cause balance issues. so i looked at each race's combination of effects in the best case scenario, like let's say all the triggered abilities happened to activate at once (unlikely but for the sake of argument) and you cast all your active abilities from imperious at the same time. what effect would it have? and when you add it all up together it's definitely more raw power than if you just used one of the mods alone, but 1) you also get drawbacks from legacy, 2) it's still not nearly as powerful as a lot of spells and perks you can obtain from other enaisiaion mods, and 3) each race is surprisingly equal in power. i noticed some races had some pretty OP powers like nords having so much frost resistance, but their other abilities kinda lock them into a certain playstyle. the more powerful triggered abilities activate less frequently too. i think legacy is amazingly well balanced on its own. adding imperious throws off the balance a little but it has its own limiting factors too. the passives in imperious just aren't that strong, and the active abilities tend to fall by the wayside. people just don't end up casting daily powers that often since the mechanic itself discourages using them.
something else i think is important to mention: none of the other race overhauls really provide racial diversity. the little stat changes they advertise on the description are actually meaningless. those are starting stat values. that's how much health/magicka/stamina a level 1 orc or high elf or w/e has. those racial stat differences do not affect how many stat points the races gain per level. just how much they start with. and the starting values are extremely low compared to what they reach within just a few levels. for the player character it's a flat 10 points per level, player's choice. for NPCs it's entirely decided by their class. a class has its own skill weights and attribute weights and when they level up they gain an amount of points in h/m/s proportional to those weights. so a level 20 orc bandit 2h boss will be almost statistically identical to a level 20 nord bandit 2h boss, within like 10 or 20 stat points, i s#*! you not.
so considering how incredibly equal the races already are (it's almost like bethesda is trying some politically correct subliminal messaging) it's very hard to imbalance the races. adding passives does a bit, and that zEdit patcher i linked above makes a big difference in race differences since it allows them to take more advantage of these passives. but it's only with legacy that you really start to see noticeable differences in how combat goes with an orc vs. with a high elf. and in my opinion those differences aren't like "wow the high elf was so much easier to kill." it's more like with know your enemy, if you've played that. which came from the same author, btw, he is very focused on game balance and does a great job of it. both mods massively increase the diversity of encounters but do a great job of making the net difficulty pretty equal. the differences you'll notice will be that high elves will be a lot better at magic and orcs will be a lot more dangerous at close range. and if you're a certain class with low magic resistance but a lot of heavy armor, your experience will be that it made orcs easier. but that's sort of the point, to add something like a pokemon type/element factor to the game. like a rock/paper/scissors dynamic.
so it definitely changes the game balance, it changes your matchups against different races. different classes will have different advantages and disadvantages against the various races. in my opinion the combination doesn't harm the game balance or make any race overpowered. the combination actually works really well together. and i'm not the kind of player who wants to combine like 3 different perk overhauls and 5 different spell mods and just go over the top with level 500 dragon boss battles. my favorite mods are the subtle ones. so if the result of this combination was garrish or extreme, i wouldn't have bothered making a patch for them. i first tested legacy just by itself, after having used imperious for some years. and i liked it a lot but i also liked imperious and already had made a lot of patches for it. so i went ahead and patched them and i'm really happy with the result personally. which is why i uploaded the patch for others to use!
ultimately it's a matter of opinion but i do think the combination is worth a try. legacy in particular is one of those mods that will change the way you play, and for the better. like you don't activate the abilities yourself, but you control the conditions that lead to them being triggered. so it's sort of like mechanics in an MMO, you're managing procs and it becomes part of your strategy. and it's a lot more pleasant to strategize around THAT than to worry about going into your inventory or setting up hotkeys so you can use an activated power that you can only use once. it speeds up the pace of the game. i would also strongly recommend combining it with know your enemy. the strategy with these triggered abilities combined with the strategy of managing elemental resistances and weaknesses, different armor types, etc. makes the game soooo much more interesting. i have tried a lot of combat mods that spice up the combat in other ways, adding rolling, hitstun, attack commitment, etc. but none of them really make it more advantageous to use strategy.
Legacy is definitely the main racial overhaulid like to use, but I plan on using Disparity (self ported) and it has a function that converts a races starting stats into a form of increased xp gain rather than just a starting skill bonus (which like you said, becomes moot).
Perhaps I didn't explain myself very well. I'll try and describe the desired effect I'm looking for and perhaps you could help?
I'm actually not a fan of Imperious racial passives, mostly for the same reasons you aren't. They really force the player into specific playstyles. That being said, I like the starting stats adjustments (this is a super simple change I can do on my own without the use of a patcher) as they mix very well with a mod that does what Disparity does and give them xp gain bonuses based on them. I'm also not against the idea of the player having access to the actual powers from Imperious as some of them are pretty interesting.
I guess the most efficient way of getting what I want (only the powers and stats from Imperious and the "passives" from Legacy) would to manually edit the race records each and remove the passives from Imperious as well as the descriptions altered to reflect Legacily passives instead of Imperious.
Looking for more of a combination of the two rather than a full on merge of them. Mostly to avoid some insane power combos as well as Imperious having rather bland and restrictive passives.
personally i don't think there is any combination of abilities from imperious + legacy that is overpowered. imperious' effect is honestly hardly noticeable except when you try to use frost spells on nords. legacy is pretty conservative. if it gives you a boost it's usually like 20% and it comes with an equivalent downside. i know my way around CK and xedit so if i noticed a problem or imbalance caused by the combination, i would just get rid of it or adjust it. and i do that for other mods all the time. i have like 600 plugins and more than half of them i've edited directly or patched. i spend more time modding the game than i do playing it honestly. so the fact that i haven't done anything to fix the racial balance is a pretty strong testament.
the only thing that i might change is nords' frost resistance. it's just way too much in my opinion. i have considered changing it many times. i originally wanted to change it to 5 or 10% and compensate for that by giving nords a perk that causes them to gain the full 50% frost resistance for 6 in-game hours after eating cooked food. and since i made a plugin that gives every playable-race NPC the alchemy and perk skill boost perks, this type of ability would actually affect NPCs if they ever managed to actually eat food within 6 hours of fighting. since NPC enemies don't eat food very often it would basically have the desired effect. players would get the lore-friendly frost resistance at their disposal, but you wouldn't be indirectly making "frost mage" a totally useless, non-viable build due to the massive prevalence of nords in skyrim. i still might do that, the reason i haven't is because i do think the frost resistance makes sense, and i haven't played a frost mage yet. i think if i made a frost mage character this would really bother me and that would give me the impetus to fix it. i just have a lot of other things on my bucket list, and that hypothetical perk would take a cool minute to develop and test.
but other than the frost resistance i don't really think there's anything in imperious that is too bad. on the one hand it does encourage you to pick your race based on your desired playstyle... or vice versa, if you pick your race first then your race kinda dictates your playstyle. i mean, you can play whatever you want, but i'm pretty sure everyone finds it stressful to be playing a race/class combination *knowing* that it's way less efficient than what they could be playing. it's just that pathological "best in slot" mentality where we try to min/max everything in video games. so i can definitely understand wanting to play without imperious or to get rid of its more polarizing passives. however i think legacy's abilities contribute to the same kind of stratifying dynamic that pushes the player towards a race's intended playstyle. i think that's inevitable. i mean if your goal is to make the races feel different to play and to fight, how do you do that? you have to make them better and worse at different things, which is inevitably going to effect what playstyles they're efficient at. skyrim tried to solve this by just making every race practically equal. no disparity at all. makes fighting NPCs way less interesting but at least nobody gets their feelings hurt when they try to play an aldmeri berserker.
imperious, legacy, and apparently (judging by your description) even disparity all do the exact opposite. they give each race some advantages and disadvantages that affect how you build the character. disparity might not make the high elf's physical skills worse but from the sound of it, you're saying it makes it harder for a high elf to level those skills than an orc? to me that sounds like it's even more restrictive. like now you're not just handicapped in terms of damage output but it takes you more effort to even progress? i think that makes perfect sense, personally, but it's definitely not super friendly to players wanting to use really counterintuitive race/class combinations.
but if you were able to port a mod to SSE then it sounds like you'll be able to sculpt whatever you end up with to your preferences. if you want to use legacy at all you still need to use the zEdit patcher. that's not like an optional part of the mod. also it sounds like you might have some misconceptions about what exactly it does. legacy does not have any passive abilities. everything in it is a triggered, scripted ability. all it does, period, is remove racial abilities altogether and add its own set of abilities through its own, totally separate system. so you aren't gonna be able to pick and choose abilities from legacy by editing the race records. all of its abilities are implemented through perks called by a script that's attached to a single "manager" perk. this manager perk does nothing unless you add it to an NPC. so you need the zEdit patcher to apply that perk to every NPC in the perk. this gives everyone the al_npc_perk which then checks what race they are and gives them a race-specific perk, which applies all the triggered effects. it does nothing without the patcher and it also has nothing really to do with the race records at all. the only reason legacy's plugin bothers editing the race records is to get rid of skyrim's vanilla racial abilities, since they kinda run counter to legacy's philosophy. it makes all the races themselves equal, so an NPC's stats and abilities will (at base) have nothing to do with their race until those perk abilities come into play.
i think legacy by itself makes for a really fun experience and balanced gameplay. combining it with know your enemy is even better. i just added imperious to the mix because i was looking for even more noticeable combat diversity. this is also the same reason i use that patcher i mentioned that lets NPCs be affected by enchantments, alchemy, and skill-boosting perks. if you used all that, minus imperious, and add this disparity mod, i think that will add up to a lot of dynamic and diverse combat. might even be too much for you, i know some people find know your enemy kinda overwhelming and to them i usually recommend running its patcher with a lower intensity value like 0.25. i personally stick with the default value. overall both mods, know your enemy and legacy, add so much to the game and ironically they both give the impression the author (a single person) thought them out way more thoroughly than bethesda thought out its own races and damage types and resistances and so on. from what i understand the author even did a literal study and statistical analysis of damage types, enemy types, average effectiveness and player opinions, while developing know your enemy. these 2 mods are just so well balanced. imperious definitely is not balanced to nearly the same extent, but it's still better than vanilla. and i think without any passives at all, it's just a little boring fighting humanoids. if you use know your enemy then you'll start to really notice how different it is fighting different enemy types. you really have to take advantage of the elements or weapon types because every enemy has significant resistances and weaknesses. but the humanoid races are all the same in that regard. legacy adds a lot of variation and most importantly the variation it adds is very noticeable because it's in the form of noticeable buffs that the enemies actually use. but it doesn't affect resistances or attributes that much so that's why i like imperious. it makes a humanoid's race just as relevant in how you fight them as know your enemy affects all the other races.