What is with the Enchanting in this game?

[Suggin]

Hi I am having a little difficulty understanding the Enchanting system in this game. Need to know the ins and outs of it, cuz I am scratching my head while looking at the Enchanting screen here. So you can do Enchanting on the fly by "equipping" a soul gem to yourself in the wilds or anywhere really and have a chance to Enchant some stuff? Or is it way better to talk to an Enchanting NPC for this? And why is everything "Cast when Used" is there no way to do an Enchant that causes a permanent buff to your stats while wearing the item? I am so confused. Is Enchanting even worth it in this game??

[Crunchy_Bacon]

uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Enchant
Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages is an n'wah's best friend.

There's a section concerning Constant Effects.

[Other]

It is possible to enchant stuff yourself, out in the wilderness ... but the difficulty curve is such that without breaking the game, your chance of succeeding at anything difficult is 20% or less. So as a practical matter, most people will do enchanting by taking their item and filled soul gem to a professional enchanter, since that service has a 100% success rate as long as you have the (very large) amount of cash to pay for it.

Enchanting is one of the most powerful features of the game, to the point that someone who uses it heavily will pretty much trivialise all the official content, and may risk breaking certain scripts. There are several aspects to that:
- enchanted cast-when-used items have no use animation, so you can fire off many more effects than a caster limited by the 2-second casting animation; they also have no failure chance. Cast-on-strike weapons are limited by how fast you can repeatedly hit your opponent (which maxes out at about 2 strikes per second for some daggers), but you don't need to do anything extra to get them to work
- the power of an enchanted item effect is limited by the enchant rating of the item you put it in, rather than the limits a caster faces due to their maximum mana and casting % chance. There are a limited number of the best items that are light enough to carry lots of (amulets & rings, mostly), but the best single item for enchanting (Daedric Tower shield) can be obtained in infinite quantity if you are willing to spend enough time hunting the golden saints that have a chance to carry them
- enchanted items with charges recharge on the fly, and with enough enchant skill (110, so over the normal limit for a naked character) everything only costs 1 charge point to use (and that 1 point recharges in 15-20 seconds). Casters need to sleep for at least an hour, or chug restore mana potions to get their mana back

There are four types of enchantment:
-cast when used is the default, and can be applied to any item, with any size soul. The item casts the embedded spell when you use the item, using some fraction of the soul's charge for each use (which limits the number of uses you can get before needing to let the item recharge). All the other types have some restrictions
- cast once can only be used on items made of paper, and the item is destroyed when you use it, so you only get one use per item
- cast on strike applies only to weapons, and for the effect to fire, you need to hit something with the weapon (you can set the effect to point at either you or the creature hit, so a sword that makes you stronger with each strike is just as possible as a sword that sets the creature you hit on fire)
- constant effect can go on any wearable item, but requires a 400-point (or larger) soul; while you wear the item, the effect is active on you. In the early game, these souls are hard to get, since the creatures that have them don't spawn if your character level is too low, and even once they start spawning, they may be too hard to kill. These souls also only fit in Grand Soul Gems (or Azura's Star), which are not trivial to get in the base game (the Tribunal expansion adds a vendor that restocks them in the city of Mournhold)

[Suggin]

Thank you for the responses. I think I am starting to get it now.

[Mr.Fish]

enchanting your own items was never worth it in vanilla morrowind, i think the max chance is something crazy like 50% or something with max skills. if you don't want to use exploits and cheat you should just get npc to enchant to prevent wasting items.

[kandnil]

Originally posted by Mr.Fish:

enchanting your own items was never worth it in vanilla morrowind, i think the max chance is something crazy like 50% or something with max skills. if you don't want to use exploits and cheat you should just get npc to enchant to prevent wasting items.

Combined with alchemy, it can definitely be worth it. Even without alchemy, and with less than maxed out skill, creating a sword with heal self when strikes can be priceless for a lower level char.

[Suggin]

I am playing pure vanilla Morrowind here, yeah. No mods whatsoever, and I am okay with that. Still having plenty of fun with the game. Besides, I've had...issues with mods with other games here on Steam before. If it ain't broke don't fix it.

But anyways I have a further question. So, if u find a random piece of blank paper in a box in the world, can u use Enchanting to turn that blank piece of paper into a magic one-use scroll? If so that would be real cool.

[Mr.Fish]

Originally posted by Exploding Potato:

I am playing pure vanilla Morrowind here, yeah. No mods whatsoever, and I am okay with that. Still having plenty of fun with the game. Besides, I've had...issues with mods with other games here on Steam before. If it ain't broke don't fix it.

But anyways I have a further question. So, if u find a random piece of blank paper in a box in the world, can u use Enchanting to turn that blank piece of paper into a magic one-use scroll? If so that would be real cool.

yes you can :)

[kandnil]

I am 99.99% sure you can't create scrolls. Not sure if there are mods that would allow it but the enchantment capacity of paper can't be all that great, I'd think.

[psychotron666]

Originally posted by kandnil:

I am 99.99% sure you can't create scrolls. Not sure if there are mods that would allow it but the enchantment capacity of paper can't be all that great, I'd think.

You can in the vanilla game. Regular paper has a 5 enchantment capacity, rolled paper has 10.

Not a lot, but viable for cast once enchantments which don't use a whole lot of points

[Mr.Fish]

Originally posted by kandnil:

I am 99.99% sure you can't create scrolls. Not sure if there are mods that would allow it but the enchantment capacity of paper can't be all that great, I'd think.

You are then 0.01% correct, hence they are one use only.

Paper

One final class of enchantable items is almost anything made of paper. All notes and blank papers (but not books), can be enchanted with spells, provided they are not already enchanted. Unfortunately, most scrolls are already enchanted, and all other scrolls have an enchant value of 0.

Just make sure not to do this with any items you might need for a quest, as there's nothing stopping you from ruining your game this way – enchanting them will change the items into entirely new items with different item IDs, which can cause quests to become impossible to complete. For paper, there is only one type of enchantment available: Cast Once.

You can use an enchanted paper item exactly once, and it will be destroyed in the process. This is not the most popular method of enchanting, but it offers an alternative to Alchemy for zero-cost, instant-action spellcasting.

Also, unlike Cast on Use or Cast on Strike enchantments, your Enchant skill at the time you use the item is irrelevant, since there is no casting cost.

The only thing that matters is what your skill was at the time you created the item. (If you paid a professional to enchant it for you, even that is irrelevant, though this service is much more expensive than it should be.)

taken from the uesp. https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Enchant

[kandnil]

I have forgotten a lot it seems! Thanks for the correction.