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Comment by causi | Hacker News Reader

As someone whose first Elder Scrolls experience was Oblivion, I can't get used to the combat. Having to worry about stats, skills, and hit percentages AND having to make sure you're accurately aiming at the enemy feels like the worst of both worlds. Morrowind could've benefitted greatly from a VATS system.

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Morrowind is all about cheesing the system. It's one of the few games that allow you to go full singularity.

How it works: You make a potion of intelligence. Drink it. Now you're more intelligent and would you look at that, the potency of said potion depends on your intelligence. So you make another one that boosts it even higher. Rinse and repeat until you have astronomical intelligence and then you brew a potion of strength that will last essentially forever and allows you to one punch a god.

Or you can make a potion of paralysis, drink it, and be stuck for years.

It's hilarious and I love it.

100% one of the first things I'd do was make some shoes that had a permanent flight enchant... then use them extensively. Also learn the mark, recall, and the various intervention spells. Too much to carry? Mark, intervention, sell, recall, carry on.

The absolute first thing to do is get a resist magicka spell, and the boots of blinding speed!

For a new player the absolute first thing to do is walk north from the starting city -> investigate the falling wizard -> read the scroll because What Could Possibly Go Wrong -> Jump

And then reload the save or start a new game.

RIP Tarhiel. I'm sure his colovian fur helm kept many new players both warm and stylish in their early runs.

100 Jump for a second or two is my favorite (+ Slowfall ofc)

Other stats also allow you to break physics over your knee:

Titanic strength will, yes, allow you to kill any enemy in a single attack. It will also, however, deplete your weapon's entire durability bar to do so.

Incredible, mind bending speed will allow you to break the speed force (most problematically on stairs or inclines), moving so fast that you blast through the world geometry and into the void beyond. (Playing on console with an analog controller that gave you more control over your movement speed was a godsend, here)

You can actually overflow the signed integers they used for stats and end up with negative intelligence doing that.

Don't ask me how I know.

It was this way in oblivion to an extent too. I remember modding a frenzy spell to be on touch, for the quickest duration, but so I could maximize the AOE range. So I ended up with a spell that would cause massive riots and kill off basically all the NPCs in a give town. So I would just go town to town, decimating everyone who lived there, until basically all the quests are gone and the game becomes unplayable

Morrowind's combat is likened to dice rolls, until you get to a high enough skill to reliably hit. Ranged combat is the worst, since you can see an arrow physically connect but not have effect.

Once I got my axe skill boosted to high hell and used a Bound Battleaxe (+10 Axe skill while holding), it felt like I could bring almost anything to its knees. Even better, the axe was tied to a constant-effect enchant on a piece of jewelry, so I could resummon in 0.1s by taking the ring off/on if I needed to.

If they had no had those damn dinosaur bird things attacking you constantly the shitty combat system also would have been a LOT less annoying - especially early on!

Then you have the brilliant idea to craft up a bigass fireball spell that will murder those stupid birds, and all the others around them just to be safe.

And it works wonders! Even if it eats your full magicka bar to cast.

Until you use it a hair too close to a town, and have every NPC out for blood.

Yes, the combat mechanics did not age well. I think there are mods that overhaul it nicely, or like a sibling comment mentions once you get some skill then it stops feeling so ridiculous (what do you mean I failed to kill this stationary rat with a warhammer that I swung ten times?). If I remember correctly at around 50 skill is when your misses stop feeling so arbitrary.

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