Racial bonuses tend to become fairly irrelevant as you progress in levels.  The beast nymphs secondary bonuses are certainly decent but nothing that cannot be achieved, if not outright neutralized, by enchanting by level 30. Is that something you have factored into your balancing?

?? Wow that's a lot of work ?

18 hours ago, mercplatypus said:

Racial bonuses tend to become fairly irrelevant as you progress in levels.  The beast nymphs secondary bonuses are certainly decent but nothing that cannot be achieved, if not outright neutralized, by enchanting by level 30. Is that something you have factored into your balancing?

You raise an excellent point, and something I have tried to take into account for all of the Nymph races.  Due to how vanilla Skyrim's progression works, the player exponentially grows in strength as you start maxing the crafting skills.  Enemies that are a challenge at level 10 are sort of a joke by mid game with a set of fully enchanted/reinforced equipment, with only boss level foes posing any real threat.  This is also assuming you have some sort of patch that negates the restoration bonus bug, no point in attempting any balance with it. 

The question is then, how much early game power is too much, if we assume that crafting begins to exceed any innate bonuses and eventually brings all the races to roughly the same power? 

If you play a character up past level 60ish, it basically does not matter what racial bonuses you have, so from this perspective one could see the Nymph Races as eventually becoming weaker than vanilla races.  This was sort of the design I had in mind, though.  In daggerfall you can get a huge amount of early game power, but since you level slowly, and since leveling up adds a great deal of power per level, eventually that super strong early game character starts to fall behind the average joe character with twice as many levels.  It doesn't work exactly the same way in skyrim since enemies are scaled to your level.

My reasoning with the Beast Nymphii sort of hinges on the fact that the bonuses they get are not capped in any way; no matter how much health/stamina/magicka regen you get, you can always use more.  I also forgot to mention that I increased base regen rates of the Beast Nymph to further magnify this effect.  The innate vanilla health regen is 0.7%, with combat regen at 70% of this (0.49%).  Beast Nymphii get 2% base health regen, just like trolls, so 1.4% in combat.  Doesn't sound like much, but this does scale with your HP totals. 

My reluctance for giving the player Lykaea's combat regen is that 1.4->2% doesn't sound like a huge difference, but with the bonuses it then becomes 6%, 6hp a second at 100 hp, 30hp/second at 500hp and so on.  Again, this still might not sound like much, but when you can start stacking health/regen bonuses and approach the 99% elemental damage reduction at capped armor/absorbance/resistances, this small amount of hp per second begins to massively increase survival.  For an essential flagged follower this is fine, it just means she stays knocked out of the fight for less time before getting back up, keeping in the flavor of her character.  For the player this may become a problem.

Basically, it can give you a power you cannot obtain by any other means in the game, which would make Beast Nymphii dramatically better than vanilla races at every stage of the game.  Whereas resistances cap at 85%, which is very hard to achieve early-mid game, but by late game you can hit this cap with the right gear and make racial resistance bonuses completely redundant.  Compare the Beast Nymph bonus to the Desert Nymph, for example who get 75% cold resistance, 10% fire resistance, and an additional 65% fire resistance for not wearing a cuirass item.  An innate resistance of 75% frost and 75% fire is very large, but as explained, this eventually becomes redundant, whereas the Beast Nymph bonuses never do. 

My intent with Beast Nymphii is that they are probably the strongest Nymph race end game, but are perhaps weaker than other Nymphii early on.  I wanted to emphasize this without causing it to be overpowered.  Truthfully, the Beast Nymph's stamina/magicka regen bonuses are sort of convenience "extras" compared to the real power of her health regen.

I'm not sure if this answered your question fully, but I hope my explanation demonstrates the amount of thought I have put into this.

15 hours ago, Jayomms said:

?? Wow that's a lot of work ?

Haha, yeah, it has been a lot of work to get to this point!  I'll probably release it here, and on nexus, and maybe on steam workshop.

Honestly, my fear at this point will be lack of interest/response.  Months of my life spent lovingly building this mod only to get like a hundred downloads or something would be such a downer. ?

But hey, as long as somebody enjoys it!

I almost forgot, I made this map recently after I had finalized the follower starting locations. 

Quote

Nymph Follower locations

 

Lykaea - near Refugee's Rest (taking all challengers and mocking followers of Boethiah.  Cowards!)
Yulia - On Steps to High Hrothgar (meditating and practicing)
Mystra - near the Shadowstone (doing research... SERIOUS research)
Synne - outside the shrine to Mehrunes Dagon (WHERE A TRUE VILLAIN SHOULD BE, BWAHAHAHA! )
Kayellie - the Frostfruit Inn in Rorikstead (taking a break after another noble quest)
Arborea - the Frostfruit Inn in Rorikstead (drinking and partying and DEFINITELY not playing squire to Kayellie)

Big credit to Gamebanshee for this very detailed map, none of the others I found were even close to this level of accuracy !

I can't wait to see this mod finally uploaded!!!

On 10/28/2018 at 9:15 AM, theman123 said:

I can't wait to see this mod finally uploaded!!!

I know, I have been saying "just a few more weeks" for the last three months now, but this time it should be true!

Just a quick update since my testing has already revealed a few things I'm going to have to change before release and I don't want to have to make a whole new blog entry for this,

The Blend Nymph passives turned out to be... well, boring.  It's basically a weaker version of the Night Nymph power, minus the shock weakness (which I decided to keep).  Blend Nymphii also get the lowest total of base stats now (+55) since they get the most combat skills.  Add that to the fact that they look the most normal out of any Nymph race, and it kind of felt like, "What is the point of playing a blend nymph?"

So I decided to add a special perk for Blend Nymphii that gives them a 5% reduction to all damage, in addition to their 10% poly-resists.  The flavor idea is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and that the mixed magical essence of the Blended Nymph produces a unique form of resilience not found in any other species. 

Not a huge change balance wise, but definitely useful, and makes them probably the "tankiest" nymph (whatever that means) when you add in the other passives.

Now as for the followers:

I'll admit, I haven't spent a lot of time fighting monsters with the Nymph girls in the last few months, mostly they have been busy looking pretty and posing etc.

So I had to re-discover what it's like for them to be actual skyrim followers.

Lykaea is a lot of fun to follow around.  She is a totally reckless berserker with zero focus on defense who punches things in the face.  She also gets knocked out pretty quick if she gets focused, but as soon as the enemies turn their attention away from her she will regen back up and start punch faces again.  I renamed her two summoned wolves to fit this style, one wolf is named "Left Fist" and the other is named "Right Fist," and I may make them different colors. 

Watching her charge at a dragon and punch it in the face is something silly all by itself.

Yulia is also very strong.  Her defensive focus on blocking + bashing combined with her attack speed buff means I have never once seen an enemy land a power attack on her.  This is exactly how I imagined her too, she is a swordmaster who fights with total discipline, not rage or bloodlust.

I had to rework Mystra's class completely because she would not stop trying to melee things, even at 0.00 weight.  She's kind of a grumpy Nymph at heart. 

Also, she kept running away for some reason.

She now has a priority of

1. summoning poxy, if poxy is not already summoned, and

2. casting destruction magic, and

3. using staff magic.

Luckily I haven't seen her try to punch anything or flee when she has to wait for magicka to recharge, so I consider this a big improvement.  Oh, and I had to rework poxy to be more aggressive too.  She now charges like a good golem and goes after whoever is attacking Mystra first.  Yay poxy.

Synne isn't super complicated.  She fights dirty a lot.  She doesn't really do much defense (she is a spellsword after all), but she balances between melee and flames of sin like she's supposed to.  Her flames of sin is easily the most impressive visually out of all the Nymph powers.  I kind of forgot how much time I spent getting it to have the right flavor to it.  It might just look like a flames spell, but you really have to see it for yourself: it sucks in ambient lighting and makes things darker, plays an evil ambient noise (I tweaked the dark-brotherhood door ambiance to sync in a loop with her casts), and creates evil glowing green craters on different surfaces (oh god, the day I went through and manually built the impact material list was a long one for sure).  It just feels "sinful."

Arborea and Kayellie are both going to need to reworking.

I have decided I really do not like Kayellie's special power. 

It's supposed to be a last minute save on the player to keep you from dying, but there's already followers who do the same thing, and it's just not very interesting.  I'm thinking about giving her an aura instead that provides a small armor buff which stacks with other flesh spells, and has some other defensive effect like % chance to negate all damage (like the light armor perk) but the second part only works on her teammates.  Kayellie will protect you!

Arborea... I don't know what to do with her.  She's just kind of weak.  And boring. 

She was supposed to be a mage that is strongest fighting other mages, but that's actually a pretty small percentage of enemies, and it feels like the rest of the time she fights like Synne but does less damage, can't tank, and gets in the way.  I didn't want to give her any other combat skills because that doesn't fit her character at all, and I don't really want to load her up with tiered magic.  I may give her a summon, like a sexy spriggan, but that feels like a half-assed solution by itself.  I like her glitterfly power so I could make it stronger, but it's like a sparkly firefly version of the spriggan bug spray which means she has to get in really close to use it. 

I have never lacked for more ideas of things I wanted to do with the mod until now, but I'm stumped by this one.  I may have to finish everything else and come back to her with a fresh perspective.

Until then, here's a few combat pictures of the girls I have taken during this testing (some of these I posted in another thread already, but those were scaled down tumblr links)

The change to Kayellie to an aura which augments your protections seems more in line with the kind of character you have fashioned for her personality wise.  I noticed reading through each of the follower descriptions that each felt like they were intended to be metaphorical, and sometimes literal, face beaters in combat. Switching Kayellie to a more defensive focus for her benefits provides a tangible reason to utilize her over Yulia and fits with the idea of nobility protecting the common folk personality you have given her.  It reminds me somewhat of the battle standard skills from the heavy armor tree from ordinator but actually moves around and remains relevant.  It would make her a better mesh with combat archers, light armor fighters, and mages in general.

For Arborea though the personality you have written for her does not really mesh super well with the skill set you describe or even with a particularly combative type of character.  Her personality is oriented to hedonism, trickery with her pretending to be drunk for fun, and generally go around in what, from the description of their relationship would appear to be, a supportive role to Kayellie.  In short you gave here much more the personality and style of a trickster or a prankster than a mage beating magic caster.  From her description I would have thought crowd control would be her primary skill set with illusion and maybe alteration magic such as the wither spell from apocalypse magic.  You would probably want to keep her focus on single target spells for balance but focusing on a more utility oriented approach that fits better with her personality could differentiate her in the way you are looking for while making her a potentially much more useful character.  It could also make her much more viable a companion in the later game when the power curve starts to work against the player.

On 11/4/2018 at 11:00 AM, mercplatypus said:

The change to Kayellie to an aura which augments your protections seems more in line with the kind of character you have fashioned for her personality wise.  I noticed reading through each of the follower descriptions that each felt like they were intended to be metaphorical, and sometimes literal, face beaters in combat. Switching Kayellie to a more defensive focus for her benefits provides a tangible reason to utilize her over Yulia and fits with the idea of nobility protecting the common folk personality you have given her.  It reminds me somewhat of the battle standard skills from the heavy armor tree from ordinator but actually moves around and remains relevant.  It would make her a better mesh with combat archers, light armor fighters, and mages in general.

 

For Arborea though the personality you have written for her does not really mesh super well with the skill set you describe or even with a particularly combative type of character.  Her personality is oriented to hedonism, trickery with her pretending to be drunk for fun, and generally go around in what, from the description of their relationship would appear to be, a supportive role to Kayellie.  In short you gave here much more the personality and style of a trickster or a prankster than a mage beating magic caster.  From her description I would have thought crowd control would be her primary skill set with illusion and maybe alteration magic such as the wither spell from apocalypse magic.  You would probably want to keep her focus on single target spells for balance but focusing on a more utility oriented approach that fits better with her personality could differentiate her in the way you are looking for while making her a potentially much more useful character.  It could also make her much more viable a companion in the later game when the power curve starts to work against the player.

Considering you haven't gotten to play the mod yet, this is a surprisingly accurate analysis, and actually the same sort of reasoning I used for the direction I went with for Arborea. 

I guess I just had an AHA! sort of moment after wracking my brain on what kind of damage spell to give her when I had the thought, "why don't I just make it do everything?"  The flavor of the spell sort of flowed from that thought too.

As I said in the other post, I ended up giving her a very long range concentration type spell (the rainbow beam) which is built of five separate effects, three of the key functions besides damage are

1. magicka absorb, which lets her wreck powerful enemy spellcasters since if they have a big enough pool she can channel it forever

2. magic resistance debuff with no peak value, which makes the spell weaken magic resistance and thus do more damage the longer she casts it on the same target, fading as soon as she stops hitting them

3. Slowing movement speed and damaging stamina, effectively keeping things away from her, if she starts hitting them from far enough away

I then re-tuned her combat AI so that she would try to stay very far away unless someone else is fighting her target too, which generally causes her to find safety in cover or high ground and shoot rainbows in support.  This gives her the ability to buff the player's damage indirectly by reducing magic resistance if the player is a spell caster, or pin down a target to keep them from getting to melee range if they the player is an archer.  She's not as good if the player is a mobile melee, since it's harder for her to keep line of sight if the player is moving in front of her target a lot, so she can't keep the channeled effects ramping up.  For someone who I imagine to have a short attention span before becoming bored, she's very patient, and if she has enough time she can bring anything down.

I would say you maybe misunderstand Kayellie and Yulia just a little bit though.  Yulia is probably among the best followers I have ever seen at fighting a boss or big monster 1v1.  She is much less powerful against a crowd, as it is harder for her raw speed to beat them when they surround her.

Kayellie's original spell was supposed to be less of a "Knightly-Tanky" focus and more of a "oops that's right I have a teammate I probably shouldn't let you die" spell.    I see her new spell as a sort of "here's a buff now leave me alone while I go break everything."  She kind of lives in her own little world.  Making it an aura ended up being a little inconvenient, since she has to stay in range of you.  Making it a very large area fire and forget buff with no LOS restrictions worked a lot better.  She is now primarily the follower you would want with you if you hate skeevers, or wolves, or rieklings, lots of little things that need to go squish.  This actually fits pretty well as a balance against yulia with her greatest strength of fighting 1v1.

Lykaea is probably adapted to be the balance between the two of them.  She is not as good as Yulia 1v1, and not as good as Kayellie at crowd control, but she does more overall damage than either of them, on the condition that she stays alive, since she has a lot less durability than either.

Mystra is kind of the total package.  Mystra does a pretty good amount of damage, and poxy is incredibly tough and aggressive for a summoned familiar.  True to Mystra's anti-social personality, she and her best golem pal can do just fine as a team and they don't really need the player's help.

Synne is more of the oddball that is hard to define.  She will fight head to head alone but will try and be sneaky if the player is fighting with her.  She's tough and does good damage and can fill most any role, really.  Sort of a jack of all trades.

I made a bunch of perks that helps all of them scale as you level too, I'm not sure if I have mentioned this here yet.  Sort of an equivalent for the 5/5 perks that give stronger effects based on the related skill, like +20% at 20 1hand skill, +40% at 40 1hand skill, etc.  This is necessary due to the odd way creation kit handles NPC perks: what they start with is what they get, you can't add anything to them in game, and loading them down with a tree's worth of perks makes them way too strong early on. 

I also added perks that scales the follower's magic magnitude based on their level too, to keep them relevant without needing any other mods to scale them. 

Synne is special because of this.  Her magic is unique because it scales twice as much when she levels compared to all the others, and it is unresistable.  It starts out a bit weaker than her melee but eventually becomes much stronger than her sword.  She might really be the doom of tamriel, after all. 

That said, don't make the mistake of thinking Arborea actually plays support for Kayellie!  Unless following behind Kayellie and trying her best to keep from giggling at everything Kayellie does counts as support.