You have some mod that makes vampires either immune to healing or directly take damage from healing spells then. The link arrows will accomplish "ally invulnerability" and self-healing via 3 effects:
1. Fortifying ally health by a large amount first (which will show as her health getting topped off) 2. Massively healing the target 3. Draining the health of the target to heal you.
If the healing doesn't work, they will only get hit by the drain and get killed.
The effect is made this way because there's no way to apply a healing effect to the player via an enemy getting hit by an arrow if you dont use script, and this mod is script free so i used this work around.
Y'know, making arrows out of soul gems is a really cool concept that I wanted to try.
But this s#*! is ludicrously overpowered and gamebreaking.
Soul Breach - those numbers are entirely too high. I'd say -40% Magic Resist and -50 Armor Rating at the absolute most. Also, remove AoE or make it a lot smaller. Roughly the size of average Fireball.
Soul Link - Needs a full rework. If you want a healing arrow that truly links the souls of target and shooter, then make it equalize the health/magicka/stamina of the linked. Whichever person has higher stats will transfer some to the other until the amounts are equal.
Soul Drain - Slow it down. Make it absorb a fairly small, specific amount per second. 25 or 30 for 10 seconds at maximum.
That's my personal recommendation. Like if you want to ruin all the fun with ridiculous cheat mods, go ahead. But label them as what they are: cheats. I would appreciate an alternate version with more reasonable stats, but I don't expect anything. Thank you for your time, have a nice day.
As stated at the top of the page, the arrows are supposed to have an impact but be scarce. You can compare them to expensive potions that refill your whole resource bar as that is roughly what you're spending in soul gem value to create them. They are not "gamebreaking", calm down. There are waaaay worse offenders to balance out there.
Soul breach - 50 armor rating is like 2% extra damage, may as well remove the effect entirely then. As for the magic resist down, lets say you manage to cast 5 spells in the 10 seconds you have. Well then the arrow effect will make those do 5 extra spells worth of damage. So this is equivalent to drinking a magicka potion that lets you cast 5 more spells which is pretty realistic if you drink one that refills your bar completely. Sure it takes more time to cast 10 spells (with a potion in the middle) than 5. But it also takes time to create space for you to then take out a bow, pull back an arrow, aim, land a shot and then take out spells again.
Soul link - Comparing to potions again, this is like giving yourself and your ally an expensive healing potion for a full heal. It gives them invuln as well sure. But only for 5s which if they're taking a lot of damage could be equivalent another big healing potion. So 4 big ones is optimally used. BUT, healing potions are SO much easier to use here. They take zero time and are even automatically consumed by allies when needed. Taking out a bow, swapping arrow type and firing an arrow when people are already almost dead to heal them in time is a huge disadvantage for the arrow compared to potions and it should therefore gain an advantage to balance this out.
Soul drain - Potion comparison again. This is like a stamina pot and a magicka pot. But only if the enemy even has that much resources. Could be much worse than 2 pots. The silence effect is an advantage of the arrow though but again it must get *something* for the effort of firing an arrow. And mages in this game are infamously overpowered so there's a whole boatload of commonly recommended mods that add silence/interrupt effects that are far cheaper and more spammable than this.
Anyway, i never said this was perfectly balanced. But calling it a "cheat" is too much. You'd have to call e.g. apocalypse and ordinator cheat mods as well then.
Edit: oh, the mod is entirely script free btw so you can change whatever numbers and mechanics you want in xEdit pretty easily.
Have you thought about adding a throwing star/knife version? Obviously that one would probably be specifically for throwing in VR unless you wanted to make animations...
Have you thought about adding something like an MCM option where you can specify an ammo to have your character auto switch to after firing one of the arrows? E.G. Breach Arrow - Equip my [steel arrows] after firing. There's a delay from either having to go through menus or waiting for iEquip to switch arrows in battle so I always end up losing a second or two before I can fire another arrow and start to take advantage of the debuff to maximize dps. Not sure if there's any other existing solution for this?
I dont know if there are existing solutions for SE unfortunately. There is one for VR (in Spellsiphon). I could maybe add something like that to this mod, but then it wouldnt be script free anymore. An ESL-flagged separate small mod would be an alternative. Maybe i should add it as a sub-feature of Focused Power Slot (and rename that mod to like Focused Equip Slots). Was considering adding the spell-swapback (Refocus) feature from Spellsiphon to that as well. We'll see when though, my modding schedule is kinda full atm ;)
But... Why? The normal forge takes so much less coding and works just as well no? If you want access to making arrows mid-exploration i would recommend you grab Voidgate and anchor yourself to a forge.
I'm not entirely sure. The reason GIST is needed is because in vanilla, soul gems with souls in them become a unique item with an unknown ID. Meaning it cannot be used in crafting since recipes require all ingredients to be precisely defined by ID. I don't know if Acquisitive fixes this like GIST does.
Feel free to try it out and report back. If your filled gems are stacking with each other and can be dropped and picked back up without losing their soul then they have the correct ID. Otherwise, you'll need GIST for it to work.
Arrows unfortunately cant have descriptions on them. It's an engine limitation. That's part of the reason why there's only 3 of them and they have names that should hopefully clearly indicate which one is which.
I found a situation where the link arrows aren't healing me. I think it is because Chasing the Dragon made me addicted so my health regen stopped, and the link arrows must be healing via increasing health regen instead of a potion restore effect.
To keep things script free, i can actually only apply effects to the targets you hit and not to the player themselves so what I've done technically for the link arrows is that they increase the targets HP by 20k, then they absorb 10k/s of health from that target while simultaneously healing the target 20k/s until the effect fades. Once it does, the drain and the health fortification effects are removed. So the result is that the target becomes invulnerable, fully healed and you get 10k hp/s absorbed.
What would make this fail? I dont know tbh... Maybe if the target is fully magic resistant. Or maybe if you got that "Companion's insight" black book buff.
when i first seen this i thought i was soul stealing arrows to fill your soul gems i was like f*** yeah save from wasting a enchantment slot but ? do they ack as soul stealers? if not could it make a nice addon? would be nice to use arrows at some point your run out of gems to fill and be nice if you could use arrows and switch arrows for when all your gems have been filled? nvm i found these Soul Trap Arrows and Bolts at Skyrim Special Edition Nexus - Mods and Community
Cool mod ( probably not using it though, since cough cough Spellsiphon :P)
This is a sidenote: but is there a mod that uses Soul Gems as Death Revival mechanic? ( so with every "tier" of soul game you receive different de/buffs and/or cooldowns)
Thanks! It's actually designed to complement Spellsiphon quite well :) If you Discharge using a breach arrow, the magic resist debuff will apply before the discharge damage so you double it. There are no magic dispels in Spellsiphon so the purge arrow is very nice to have, especially when facing mages that use summons and/or reanimations. The drain arrow is just useful control to get rid of annoying mages, that's always good to have ;)
Now if you dont use the VR arrow cooldown addon you don't have a convenient way to return to bound arrows after firing these but there's quite a few situations where you'll just fire 1 arrow with the bound bow before switching back anyway. And you can also switch to your secondary weapon and keep fighting with that for a few sec then toggle back to the bow again and you'll have the bound arrows back.
Not sure if there's a mod that uses soul gems as a revival material. I know there's one that uses dragon souls for it... Not quite the same thing though :D
29 comments
1. Fortifying ally health by a large amount first (which will show as her health getting topped off)
2. Massively healing the target
3. Draining the health of the target to heal you.
If the healing doesn't work, they will only get hit by the drain and get killed.
The effect is made this way because there's no way to apply a healing effect to the player via an enemy getting hit by an arrow if you dont use script, and this mod is script free so i used this work around.
But this s#*! is ludicrously overpowered and gamebreaking.
Soul Breach - those numbers are entirely too high. I'd say -40% Magic Resist and -50 Armor Rating at the absolute most. Also, remove AoE or make it a lot smaller. Roughly the size of average Fireball.
Soul Link - Needs a full rework. If you want a healing arrow that truly links the souls of target and shooter, then make it equalize the health/magicka/stamina of the linked. Whichever person has higher stats will transfer some to the other until the amounts are equal.
Soul Drain - Slow it down. Make it absorb a fairly small, specific amount per second. 25 or 30 for 10 seconds at maximum.
That's my personal recommendation. Like if you want to ruin all the fun with ridiculous cheat mods, go ahead. But label them as what they are: cheats.
I would appreciate an alternate version with more reasonable stats, but I don't expect anything. Thank you for your time, have a nice day.
Soul breach - 50 armor rating is like 2% extra damage, may as well remove the effect entirely then. As for the magic resist down, lets say you manage to cast 5 spells in the 10 seconds you have. Well then the arrow effect will make those do 5 extra spells worth of damage. So this is equivalent to drinking a magicka potion that lets you cast 5 more spells which is pretty realistic if you drink one that refills your bar completely. Sure it takes more time to cast 10 spells (with a potion in the middle) than 5. But it also takes time to create space for you to then take out a bow, pull back an arrow, aim, land a shot and then take out spells again.
Soul link - Comparing to potions again, this is like giving yourself and your ally an expensive healing potion for a full heal. It gives them invuln as well sure. But only for 5s which if they're taking a lot of damage could be equivalent another big healing potion. So 4 big ones is optimally used. BUT, healing potions are SO much easier to use here. They take zero time and are even automatically consumed by allies when needed. Taking out a bow, swapping arrow type and firing an arrow when people are already almost dead to heal them in time is a huge disadvantage for the arrow compared to potions and it should therefore gain an advantage to balance this out.
Soul drain - Potion comparison again. This is like a stamina pot and a magicka pot. But only if the enemy even has that much resources. Could be much worse than 2 pots. The silence effect is an advantage of the arrow though but again it must get *something* for the effort of firing an arrow. And mages in this game are infamously overpowered so there's a whole boatload of commonly recommended mods that add silence/interrupt effects that are far cheaper and more spammable than this.
Anyway, i never said this was perfectly balanced. But calling it a "cheat" is too much. You'd have to call e.g. apocalypse and ordinator cheat mods as well then.
Edit: oh, the mod is entirely script free btw so you can change whatever numbers and mechanics you want in xEdit pretty easily.
Would it be possible to add the crafting to your Spell Forge also?
Feel free to try it out and report back. If your filled gems are stacking with each other and can be dropped and picked back up without losing their soul then they have the correct ID. Otherwise, you'll need GIST for it to work.
What would make this fail? I dont know tbh... Maybe if the target is fully magic resistant. Or maybe if you got that "Companion's insight" black book buff.
if not could it make a nice addon?
would be nice to use arrows at some point your run out of gems to fill and be nice if you could use arrows and switch arrows for when all your gems have been filled?
nvm i found these Soul Trap Arrows and Bolts at Skyrim Special Edition Nexus - Mods and Community
This is a sidenote: but is there a mod that uses Soul Gems as Death Revival mechanic? ( so with every "tier" of soul game you receive different de/buffs and/or cooldowns)
Now if you dont use the VR arrow cooldown addon you don't have a convenient way to return to bound arrows after firing these but there's quite a few situations where you'll just fire 1 arrow with the bound bow before switching back anyway. And you can also switch to your secondary weapon and keep fighting with that for a few sec then toggle back to the bow again and you'll have the bound arrows back.
Not sure if there's a mod that uses soul gems as a revival material. I know there's one that uses dragon souls for it... Not quite the same thing though :D