Spell Damage Leveling

[Myst42]

I'm writing this thread as a place to get some advice on the best methods of leveling spells, as in, formulas.

 

Back In the day, I played with normal enemies, so I was subject to the game's crappy leveling system that turned enemies into HP sponges with high level foes reaching 3000 HP

I made a mod that adds colored bloodskal weapon beams into a re-appliable enchantment, but I had a problem: leveling the beam's damage.

On the setting I had, I ended up having to lower difficulty to a minimum or else the beams would only tickle enemies.

Eventually, I came up with a formula that made some of the beams do decent damage, but it still depended too much on difficulty setting.

 

Some time later, the HP sponge thing, began bothereing me too much, especially since I added some difficulty mods. But enemies health started to vary from beatable 150ish regulars, lots of random 300-500 bosses where there should be goons, and some overlords reaching 4000 when my character was only lvl 10, so I had enough, and looked for a solution, which led me to NPC Stat Rescaler.

 

My gaming life got a lot better afterwards, except for one small detail.

My own mod, scales the spells according to the old way, so now my own bloodskal beams are overpowered beyond reason. I have one custom sword I'm making with the beams, that can level dragons in 2 shots and practically there's no dungeon enemy that can stand a single beam.

 

So my new aim is to make an intuitive leveling system for my beams that works hopefully both for vanilla HP sponge design and stat rescaled one.

I also ask on a thread because I'm using other spell leveling-assistant mods, featuring Vokrii as my perk mod, Simply Balanced, and Simple Spell Scaling.

However, I dont have a good understanding of how skyrim's leveling system works, or doesnt work. I think that Simply Balanced, can add a spell damage bonus for percentage of destruction skill, but it's configured via MCM. Spell scaling I'm not sure how it does it, haven't checked yet, but it's probably something similar.

 

There's also the thing about my bloodskal beams not being "actor casted" spells, they're casted by a script, so they dont really cost the player any mana (in game they do, but that's also a scripted thing), so I'm not entirely sure how does any of the character's perks or skills affect (or not), the magnitude of the final beam.

 

In my personal opinion, leveling damage numbers in games should be related both to skills and character level, but it's tricky as hell to achieve the perfect balance, so you dont end up with a high level character that can one-shot everything just because level, or a too low level character that can't do any damage.

To the day, I can't understand why the fuck did the creators include magic as a combat thing in the game, if they weren't gonna make it functional. Heard many pple saying vanilla magic is even completely worthless.

 

Anyway, this is a fragment of  my current scripting formula to calculate damage from the beams. Sometimes it works and makes reasonable damage, depending on the type of beam, enemy, difficulty setting and mod setting, and sometimes it either does no damage at all or in my case, one-shots everything.

Right now, my setting relies on skill level and character level, but it still is too sensitive to difficulty setting and is designed to deal with high HP sponges on medium difficulty, or else, it doesnt work very well.

Resistance to spells on the magic effect item (CK) also seems to play a major role on how the damage is dealt. I'm not entirely sure, but I think fire effect, on enemies with fire resistance, does reeasonable damage on one setting. But I used the exact same formula on a new type of beam with no magic resistance, and it kills everything instead.

Spoiler

Float LevelScalingFactor
Float DestructionDmg
Float RestorationDmg
Float SneakDmg
Float ConjurationDmg
Float AlterationDmg
Float IllusionScale
Float SiphonDmg
Float FearScale
Float HolyDmg
Float PoisonDmg

Function BloodskalBeamLeveling(Actor Subject)
	
	ActorLevel = Subject.GetLevel()
	LevelScalingFactor = (ActorLevel * 0.1)
		
	DestructionDmg = (Subject.GetActorValue("Destruction") * 1.7 * LevelScalingFactor)
	RestorationDmg = (Subject.GetActorValue("Restoration") * 1.3 * LevelScalingFactor)
	SneakDmg = (Subject.GetActorValue("Sneak") * 1.3 * LevelScalingFactor)
	ConjurationDmg = (Subject.GetActorValue("Conjuration") * LevelScalingFactor)
	AlterationDmg = (Subject.GetActorValue("Alteration") * LevelScalingFactor)
	IllusionScale = (Subject.GetActorValue("Illusion") * LevelScalingFactor)
	SiphonDmg = AlterationDmg * 0.7
	HolyDmg = RestorationDmg * 0.6
	PoisonDmg = SneakDmg * 0.2
	
	If Subject == PlayerRef
		If Subject.HasSpell(BloodskalMagicRED)
			BloodskalBeamREDPlayer_V.SetNthEffectMagnitude(0, DestructionDmg)
			BloodskalBeamREDPlayer_H.SetNthEffectMagnitude(0, DestructionDmg)
			FearScale = IllusionScale
			BloodskalBeamREDPlayer_V.SetNthEffectMagnitude(1, FearScale)
			BloodskalBeamREDPlayer_H.SetNthEffectMagnitude(1, FearScale)
		EndIf

;Etc...

 

 

Basically, I'm trying to find a proper formula that is less dependant on variables like mod list, difficulty setting and NPC health, and works with any setting, intuitively.

So I'm looking for advice and ideas on how to calculate things properly

Any opinions?