Question about leveling up

[Ubernerd Lucas]

Having enjoyed both Oblivion and Skyrim, and having had friends swear that Morrowind is a far superior experience, I'm debating picking this up while it's on sale. The only thing holding me back is the leveling system; my biggest complaint with Oblivion was that even moderate difficulties demanded you optimize your character (meaning lots of tedious grinding) or else enemies would grow to destroy you in combat. Does Morrowind have the same issues with enemy scaling, or can I just play how I want and not worry about being outclassed by enemies, or do I have to carefully manage by level-ups?

Tl;dr: does Morrowind require large amounts of character optimization to deal with enemy scaling?

[Asus]

If you don't build up your character.... enemies will hand you your ass. It's that simple. Stronger enemies will require you to level up even more.

Don't bring a knife to a ... well you know.

[St3amed Hams]

Enemy strength in morrowind is mostly area based rather then level based. Go somewhere with powerful enemies as a low level and you WILL lose. Early on you will have trouble fighting common bandits, but over time you will get stronger.

I'm not sure what you mean in oblivion because enemy strength was based on your level to ensure a consistent difficulty.

[Asus]

Originally posted by Cat Branchman:

Enemy strength in morrowind is mostly area based rather then level based.

If he wants to complete the game he is going to have to level up. He will have to face stronger enemies. With that said Morrowind IS level based. No ifs, ands, or buts about it.

[Ubernerd Lucas]

Originally posted by Cat Branchman:

Enemy strength in morrowind is mostly area based rather then level based. Go somewhere with powerful enemies as a low level and you WILL lose. Early on you will have trouble fighting common bandits, but over time you will get stronger.

I'm not sure what you mean in oblivion because enemy strength was based on your level to ensure a consistent difficulty.

Thanks, that was what I was hoping to hear :)

In Oblivion, enemies leveled up when you did, but if you focused on non-combat skills, didn't get high enough skill increases, or tried to be an odd hybrid build without a firm grasp of the leveling mechanics, the enemies would gain a power advantage over you due to their combat optimization. This was made especially annoying with things like acrobatics and athletics increasing in a hard-to-control manner.

[Ubernerd Lucas]

I'm not concerned about having to level-up, just don't want to have to spend half my time managing what skills I use to maximize each level up or risk gimping my character.

[JtDarth]

Originally posted by Ubernerd Lucas:

I'm not concerned about having to level-up, just don't want to have to spend half my time managing what skills I use to maximize each level up or risk gimping my character.

Thats definitely not something you have to worry about with morrowind. I remember a character I had that used enchanting as his primary combat skill and did extremely well once I got to the level where I could reliably enchant items myself.

[merchantmudcrab]

Enemies don't level with you, they have fixed health etc. in Morrowind (a few exceptions maybe but could not find any at the wiki), so leveling is way safer as in Oblivion but the beginning is harder of course.

The appearence of stronger enemies types and the spawn rate of enemies in the wild overall is leveled but already at level 25 everthing will spawn. So you need to focus a bit on training your main attack skill and defense skill and try to increase you health through in strengh and constitution attributes the first 20 levels so you can hold up.

[Shajirr]

Originally posted by Ubernerd Lucas:

I'm not concerned about having to level-up, just don't want to have to spend half my time managing what skills I use to maximize each level up or risk gimping my character.

There is a perfect solution for that - mod called GCD - it makes levelling completely automatic, so you won't have to manage anything at all.

However, even without that mod, you can pretty much play however you like - there is no such ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ like in Oblivion where all enemies would level with you. As others already pointed out, enemies have fixed strength in Morrowind.

[JtDarth]

Originally posted by White Spirit:

Originally posted by Ubernerd Lucas:

I'm not concerned about having to level-up, just don't want to have to spend half my time managing what skills I use to maximize each level up or risk gimping my character.

There is a perfect solution for that - mod called GCD - it makes levelling completely automatic, so you won't have to manage anything at all.

However, even without that mod, you can pretty much play however you like - there is no such ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ like in Oblivion where all enemies would level with you. As others already pointed out, enemies have fixed strength in Morrowind.

The enemies being static creates the issue of there being no valid indicators as to their strength, outside of directly fighting them. I remember a cave just outside of the starting city that had enemies that were pretty much invinvible to a starting character.

[ZarahNeander]

Originally posted by Cat Branchman:

Enemy strength in morrowind is mostly area based rather then level based.

This is actually an obstinate myth. 80% of all encounters, if not more, are leveled. Examples:

Illunibi at lvl 1 -> some dreamers, at lvl3 -> ash zombies.
Relas tomb at lvl 1 -> a Scamp, at lvl 5 -> a Daedroth.

What's never leveled though are NPC's and some interiors have hand placed baddies, i.e, you will always encounter a Golden Saint in Ibar-Dan, no matter what level.

Just saying...

[JtDarth]

Originally posted by Lollipop:

Originally posted by Cat Branchman:

Enemy strength in morrowind is mostly area based rather then level based.

This is actually an obstinate myth. 80% of all encounters, if not more, are leveled. Examples:

Illunibi at lvl 1 -> some dreamers, at lvl3 -> ash zombies.
Relas tomb at lvl 1 -> a Scamp, at lvl 5 -> a Daedroth.

What's never leveled though are NPC's and some interiors have hand placed baddies, i.e, you will always encounter a Golden Saint in Ibar-Dan, no matter what level.

Just saying...

The majority of the enemies are static, and even the enemies that changed aren't leveled, they are legitimately different enemies. It isnt like in skyrim or oblivion where the enemies are called the same thing but have different stats.
From UESP wiki, the one which has more data than the official wiki:
http://uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Morrowind_for_Oblivion_Players
Enemy Scaling Creatures do not scale to your level; their stats are fixed.
This means that a bandit will always be that same bandit, both equipment and stat wise, whether you enter the area at lvl 1 or lvl 50.

[ZarahNeander]

Originally posted by DarthNachoz:

The majority of the enemies are static, and even the enemies that changed aren't leveled, they are legitimately different enemies. It isnt like in skyrim or oblivion where the enemies are called the same thing but have different stats.
From UESP wiki, the one which has more data than the official wiki:
http://uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Morrowind_for_Oblivion_Players
Enemy Scaling Creatures do not scale to your level; their stats are fixed.
This means that a bandit will always be that same bandit, both equipment and stat wise, whether you enter the area at lvl 1 or lvl 50.

Not true. Look at the leveled lists in the CS and the associated encounters. And the wiki, as helpful as it is, is wrong in that regard.
You are correct in one point though: a scamp is always a scamp and doesnt get replaced with a stronger scamp when you level up. Instead it gets replaced with atronachs, you wont see scamps outside of daedric shrines at lvl 20. Further named NPS's are always unleveled

[Clover]

I think the only legitimately scaled enemy in the game (that I have seen) is the dark brotherhood assassin. They get better weapons as you get stronger, and eventually, when daedric weapons alone aren't enough to kill you, the dark brotherhood starts sending more than one assassin at a time.

[JtDarth]

Originally posted by Lollipop:

Originally posted by DarthNachoz:

The majority of the enemies are static, and even the enemies that changed aren't leveled, they are legitimately different enemies. It isnt like in skyrim or oblivion where the enemies are called the same thing but have different stats.
From UESP wiki, the one which has more data than the official wiki:
http://uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Morrowind_for_Oblivion_Players
Enemy Scaling Creatures do not scale to your level; their stats are fixed.
This means that a bandit will always be that same bandit, both equipment and stat wise, whether you enter the area at lvl 1 or lvl 50.

Not true. Look at the leveled lists in the CS and the associated encounters. And the wiki, as helpful as it is, is wrong in that regard.
You are correct in one point though: a scamp is always a scamp and doesnt get replaced with a stronger scamp when you level up. Instead it gets replaced with atronachs, you wont see scamps outside of daedric shrines at lvl 20. Further named NPS's are always unleveled

No, the wiki is completely right, in that the enemies arent scaled to your level. It doesnt actually modify their stats to be close to yours, instead it has different 'level thresholds' that trigger different spawns. Levelled and scaled technically arent the same thing, and I guess I gave the impression that they were. I had assumed I was talking to those who don't know the inner workings of the game, and that thoe who knew the inner workings would know what I meant.

Anyway, I think the only scaled enemies are the dark brotherhood assasins, aside from that all enemy types have a static level, with a differently named entry for the different enemy varieties.
The majority of those levelled lists are, if I'm remembering correctly, (It's been a long time since I've done any modding in morrowind, close to 6 years now) related to loot, and not the enemies themselves. The enemies themselves are controlled by a levelled list, but its a much shorter list than in the subsequent games, and it doesn't have like 10 variations of the same entry with just different equipment or boosted health values. It's more like 2 or 3 entries.

Overall, aside from thresholds that are like 5-10 levels apart, as well as levelling being much slower in vanilla morrowind (barring trainer abuse), the game tends to be much more static, and never runs into the issue of a random highwayman in full daedric hitting up a famous figure for a few hundred septims.
That always was the thing that upset me about oblivion, is that events like that completely broke immersion, and skyrim was much better about that, while morrowind avoided the problem entirely, as did fallout. Even the random raiders jumping a power-armored guy carrying a plasma rifle was explained as them being high out of their minds on a mixture of every drug known to man. The super mutants were explained to be able to tear apart power armor, although there is no on-screen showing of that, it's at least justifiable.
A random dude wearing daedric armour, which is worth thousands of septims for the cheapest piece, who then hits people up for a hundred septims has no explanation.

[Asus]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FONN-0uoTHI