What is the best way to fix Oblivion's Leveling system in 2019?

[Lonewolf2797]

I'm currently torn between a few different leveling mods.
- +5 All Attribute Modifiers
- Galerion Natural Leveling Revised
- Realistic Leveling

I like them all for different reasons. With +5 Al Attribute Modifiers, it's a simple mod that is as close to the Vanilla game as possible, except without all the micromanaging of efficient leveling. However, I fear that my character may become too overpowered from getting such high bonuses each level.

Galerion would be my second choice, and seems to be the favorite of a lot of people, but I'm curious as to how over or under powered a late game character would look like with this system in place. Also, I can't seem to get the console commands for customizing it to work, but that's not a deal breaker because it seems pretty well balanced the way it is.

Realistic Leveling also seems to be used by a ton of people who swear by it and I'm curious as to why anyone would pick that over Galerion or just having +5 to all attributes. It seems a bit too complicated for my liking but I could be persuaded either way.

I'd just like to hear the thoughts of people who have used these mods long term and what the outcome will look like on a play through late game. Thanks, cheers!

[Dioblackironoyster]

Originally posted by Ubeogesh:

To everyone who says that oblivion leveling system isn't broken:
I get that it's a great challenge to min max this system and it's rewarding to overcome it.
But at the same time it is stupid that it incentivizes the player to not level up, and it introduces too much grind (1) and micromanagement (2). It is also not a good leveling system when it encourages you to not level up.
E.g. I wanna play a standard mage class from the template classes... I use all the schools of magic, and I basically will level up really fast, my skills and stats will be very low on high character level, and my character will be very weak relatively to the leveled world. But if I stick some out-of-character major skills into my class that I won't use, my leveling up will slow down and I will naturally get more stats and more skills therefore be stronger when I level up.
Therefore a "specialized" class is weaker than "jack-of-all-trades" which is backwards of how it should be.

footnote 1:
I do like grindy games. My most played game is Diablo 2, which is grindy in essence. But it has an exciting interactive grind loop where you kill random monsters on random maps and identify random loot; Oblivion's grind is "hold a key until your skill levels up", which couldn't be more boring.
footnote 2:
I do like micromanagement when it fits in the game... like Starcraft you micromanage your units to optimize their health pools, scout, etc; or for example in Dota 2 you micro-manage summoned\dominated creatures to stack camps and do all kinds of good stuff. But in Oblivion the character skill micromanagement gets in the way of actually playing the game and greatly limits the class customizations.
Is this a familiar situation: oops I am at 9\10 to level up, can't use any of my major skills until i max that 10 endurance out... so better go train with a summon skeleton... oh wait conjuration is my major skill I cannot do that.

P.S.
I wrote this opus because Oblivion is really dear to me. But after the initial strong feelings for it have settled, I realized it's biggest flaw; I've played through the game many times and every time I hated what I did yet continued playing.

Yeah the game is amazing, but because I would like to build the best character possible, good in everything I haven't finished it yet. I also dislike the "leveled rewards". I would prefer that the quests themselves would be level locked and there would be only one version for each item.

[Lonewolf2797]

Thank you for all the effort in your reply. This is awesome!

[Celestia(L)_kaligo]

Originally posted by Leeux:

Instead of using a character leveling you could just use a world leveling overhaul... that would solve the problem too... most of the world leveling overhails don't require altering the character leveling, since they "fix" the vanilla problems in their own ways.

As for the character leveling mods you've listed, the +5 attr one is the simplest and risk free way, but it works best if you avoid leveling up too much... i.e. up to ~L15 at most or so... past that you'd become a bit overpowered IMO, unless you consciously restrain/sabotage yourself on some level ups (like, f.e., adding points to a stat that is of no use to your combat skills every so and so levels...)

EDIT: Ofc. you could instead use the +3 version (instead of the +5 one) and that would average up to a normal leveled up character, even if it would be a tad slightly less efficient at the start.

I've used RL myself in the past, and I liked it... but I remember having some problems at some point, but sadly I don't remember the specifics... what I remember is it just stopped working and had to clean reinstall it.

These days, I've settled on the combination of Oscuro's and/or Maskar's (world leveling) + nGCD (character leveling.)

Keep in mind that if you don't use a world overhaul even if you'll not be eventually underpowered as in vanilla Oblivion, you'll still have to deal with common bandits in daedric gear by L18 or so.

So, could you post out a link to the mods that you're talking about?

[Leeux]

Originally posted by Celestia(L)_kaligo:

So, could you post out a link to the mods that you're talking about?

Sure,

Here they are, at least the ones I mentioned in the post you quoted:

World leveling/scaling overhaul (these can be used together):
* Maskar's Oblivion Overhaul[www.nexusmods.com]
* Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul[www.nexusmods.com]

Character leveling/progression overhaul (pick only one of these):
* nGCD[www.nexusmods.com]
* All +5 Attribute Modifiers[www.nexusmods.com]
* Realistic Leveling[www.nexusmods.com]
* Oblivion XP Update[www.nexusmods.com]

Keep in mind many of these mentioned mods *require* a working OBSE setup, though.

EDIT: I didn't mentioned Oblivion XP in my post, but I thought that I could add an extra option, for people that like getting XP from actions instead of just leveling by doing stuff and raising skills.

Not sure if you were looking for something more specific?

[Shedding my mortal skin]

For another option, take a look at Attribute Progression Redesign.
Attribute Progression Redesign[www.nexusmods.com]
It's a very simple mod, yet it makes minmaxing much less important by simply carrying skill points between level-ups. So if you gain 7 skill increases for Strength skills, you'll end up with a +3. In vanilla, you'd need to gain 7 Strength increases the next level just to match that. With APR, you only need to not take the +3 increase and increase your Strength skills three times to hit a +5 increase the next time you level up.

It takes a great amount of pressure off of minmaxing and prevents you from screwing yourself over if you level up anything that isn't +4 or +5, yet it also doesn't change the leveling system drastically like mods such as Oblivion XP or Realistic Leveling do, so it stays true to vanilla Oblivion. Plus, it isn't anywhere near as broken as All +5 Modifiers is. I've been using it since it came out, and I couldn't be happier with it.

[Turtleswatter]

As I said in previous posts about this subject, it's taking the usual format: The min/maxers shouting about how it's the "only" way to play the game or you're lacking somehow against the quieter voices who just want to play the game as the romp it was meant to be. As always I'll post the link.

There's a lot of ways of levelling to suit yourself without mods in Oblilvion. The levelling system is actually quite versatile once you get your head around it; and there's no need for the restrictive min/maxing gameplay unless that's what you enjoy doing.

https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Leveling

Pay particular attention to the "Levelling Problem" section which gives you the options.

[psychotron666]

Oblivions leveling is fine, it's the world scaling that's awful. Though on a side note may God have mercy on the soul of people who play mages but then don't pick magic skills to keep themselves at low levels. You're missing the entire point of the game.

Every beast dungeon is 100% imps and will only have iron and steel items below level 4. The battle of kvatch at level 4 will be all stunted scamps and stunted clannfear and boring af, yet doing it at level 17 will be all xivilai and storm atronach and spider daedra.

The way loot is leveled, you will never find anything cool and interesting laying around (in the world space you will only find iron and steel items because hand placed objects aren't leveled and Bethesda made sure not to put any good items laying around not behind a level wall), just stuff inside chests will be randomly generated .

It makes exploring and looting boring and predictable. I walk up to a beast dungeon with imps outside at low level and I don't even bother with it, I don't care about killing imps and looting iron and steel, so I continue travelling.

The world scaling discourages exploration and dungeon delving. Simply put, at low levels you won't find anything cool or interesting or any decent artifacts.

Even quest rewards like chillrend can be the best sword in the game if collected at high levels, or a useless pos at low levels (and much more likely to receive at low levels as the quest should very much be a low level quest and is typically encountered near the beginning of the game)

[Shedding my mortal skin]

Originally posted by Turtleswatter:

As I said in previous posts about this subject, it's taking the usual format: The min/maxers shouting about how it's the "only" way to play the game or you're lacking somehow against the quieter voices who just want to play the game as the romp it was meant to be. As always I'll post the link.

You're not wrong, but I wouldn't exactly say avoiding ever leveling up or turning down the difficulty slider are very good ways to play the game, the former especially at higher difficulty settings. Psychotron666's post is excellent in covering just why the leveling system seems busted. It works fine.

My memory is a little fuzzy, but I'm almost certain Oblivion NPCs increase all their stats every time you level up, regardless of what perks you choose. So it you want to play in the higher slider settings, you'll almost certainly have to minmax your damage-dealing attribute and Endurance as soon as possible (especially if you're playing melee) or invest time into power-leveling magic skills so you can fix your skills that way or simply nerf your opponents. It also doesn't help that bandits will end up having Glass or Daedric and turn into complete damage sponges.

[Turtleswatter]

Originally posted by Shedding my mortal skin:

Originally posted by Turtleswatter:

As I said in previous posts about this subject, it's taking the usual format: The min/maxers shouting about how it's the "only" way to play the game or you're lacking somehow against the quieter voices who just want to play the game as the romp it was meant to be. As always I'll post the link.

You're not wrong, but I wouldn't exactly say avoiding ever leveling up or turning down the difficulty slider are very good ways to play the game, the former especially at higher difficulty settings. Psychotron666's post is excellent in covering just why the leveling system seems busted. It works fine.

My memory is a little fuzzy, but I'm almost certain Oblivion NPCs increase all their stats every time you level up, regardless of what perks you choose. So it you want to play in the higher slider settings, you'll almost certainly have to minmax your damage-dealing attribute and Endurance as soon as possible (especially if you're playing melee) or invest time into power-leveling magic skills so you can fix your skills that way or simply nerf your opponents. It also doesn't help that bandits will end up having Glass or Daedric and turn into complete damage sponges.

As with anything, there has to be grey areas. You're right in that every level up the enemies increase their melee stats by +5. This means that if you want to play at the same pace as the enemies you have to level up in a specific way (min/max) otherwise the game becomes way too hard.

This is quite restrictive to people who want to use a bit of magic, bit of melee and mess around with some hand to hand.

The thing about the slider is that people think of it as a easy/hard/legendary setting. If a game gives you this option then the difficulty you choose is a constant. The slider is not a difficulty tool in this sense. When you say "turn the slider down" what do you mean and from what point? Is your default setting right up at the top or in the middle? If there is any debate on this then the argument about moving the slider is moot because it's not a constant, it's designed to be a tool. You can't argue that turning a slider down from any position whatsoever is wrong when the starting points can be so different.

For those people who don't want their play to be so restricted by sticking the slider right to the top and min/maxing, there are many varieties of ways you can level up. And you do need to level up otherwise the game will be full of scamps and boring loot and nothing else.

You can. for example, chose not to sleep until you feel comfortable that the next level will not overstretch you. Sometimes you level up several times because you feel the game has become too easy and you want some new enemies. Sometimes you misjudge.

The beauty of Oblivion is that there is a fantastic set up where you can level up at exactly the right speed to maximise your enjoyment of the game. Unfortunately not everybody appreciates this - because mindsets.

[solidap]

Without scaled leveling, Oblivion will just devolve into lightspeed drive-by one shot poking everything like in Morrowind. After a certain point it's pretty much impossible for that game to be challenging.

I think the only glaring flaw in Oblivion are the fixed level/stats on items. They don't scale like everything else, so it can mean you're stuck with some pretty ♥♥♥♥♥♥ gear (very bad if you're a warrior type, and very bad for NPCs who remain weak but have to fight high level deadra if the player level is high). So I'd probably go with a mod that has items scale and match your level like the Knights of the Nine items do and leave it at that.

[psychotron666]

Originally posted by solidap:

Without scaled leveling, Oblivion will just devolve into lightspeed drive-by one shot poking everything like in Morrowind. After a certain point it's pretty much impossible for that game to be challenging.

I think the only glaring flaw in Oblivion are the fixed level/stats on items. They don't scale like everything else, so it can mean you're stuck with some pretty ♥♥♥♥♥♥ gear (very bad if you're a warrior type, and very bad for NPCs who remain weak but have to fight high level deadra if the player level is high). So I'd probably go with a mod that has items scale and match your level like the Knights of the Nine items do and leave it at that.

All Bethesda games have level scaling within the world. Skyrim and fallout 3 handle level scaling 10x better than oblivion..
I have nothing against level scaling, I just hate oblivion level scaling within the world. It makes the game far more unenjoyable to me

[Shedding my mortal skin]

Originally posted by Turtleswatter:

The thing about the slider is that people think of it as a easy/hard/legendary setting. If a game gives you this option then the difficulty you choose is a constant. The slider is not a difficulty tool in this sense. When you say "turn the slider down" what do you mean and from what point? Is your default setting right up at the top or in the middle?

I'm a little sick right now, so I have a bit of amnesia regarding what I wrote yesterday. But I think my point had to do with how turning down the difficulty slider makes you deal more and more damage to the point where you can kill anything in only a few hits. Turning down the slider so you deal more damage feels cheap to me (though I do have a tendency to make games significantly harder than they need to be intentionally and out of habit). For reference, my difficulty slider is usually set around the point where the cursor aligns with the start of the R on the Return button- the 70-75 range, from what I can tell. That gives me enough room to use the classic heavy armor, shield and sword combo while still being able to mess around with bits of magic and not have to worry about minmaxing. If I want to use light armor instead, I'll turn it down possibly another 10%.

Though I should also say this range has never given me much trouble likely because I make sure to have all attributes in my major skills. Armorer, Blade, Alchemy, Illusion (which I don't even use), Restoration, Acrobatics and Security is usually enough for me to not have to worry about any enemies aside from groups of bandits (due to an AI mod I installed) or Daedra (because screw reflect damage). Even before I installed APR.

Originally posted by psychotron666:

All Bethesda games have level scaling within the world. Skyrim and fallout 3 handle level scaling 10x better than oblivion..

The level scaling itself is fine, but Skyrim also gives you consistent damage that is VERY manipulatable. Enchanting or smithing are busted. In comparison, Oblivion makes you do significantly less damage by simply lacking stamina (at least with melee. I'm not sure if it also applies to Marksman). So that's another reason the game's so hard.

[Turtleswatter]

For reference, my difficulty slider is usually set around the point where the cursor aligns with the start of the R on the Return button- the 70-75 range, from what I can tell. That gives me enough room to use the classic heavy armor, shield and sword combo while still being able to mess around with bits of magic and not have to worry about minmaxing. If I want to use light armor instead, I'll turn it down possibly another 10%.

Thank you for making the effort to respond when you're not feeling well. I hope you get better soon.

I've just quoted the bit of your post which describes exactly how the slider should be used. You place it just at the point where the difficulty is just good enough for you to get the maximum enjoyment from the game (for you).

Yet you talk about someone who may set the slider lower than your preferred setting as kind of cheap. And this also -depressingly - highlights the attitudes of certain people towards the levelling in Oblivion.

At the end of the day a person should set the slider at the point where they will get the maximum enjoyment for them from the game. You like it at 75% others may like it at 50%. Nobody should be saying that their way is ok but others are not.

[Shedding my mortal skin]

Originally posted by Turtleswatter:

For reference, my difficulty slider is usually set around the point where the cursor aligns with the start of the R on the Return button- the 70-75 range, from what I can tell. That gives me enough room to use the classic heavy armor, shield and sword combo while still being able to mess around with bits of magic and not have to worry about minmaxing. If I want to use light armor instead, I'll turn it down possibly another 10%.

Yet you talk about someone who may set the slider lower than your preferred setting as kind of cheap.

No, I was saying it feels cheap when I have to lower it for a fight. Like how just earlier, I had to lower probably 20% just to fight Lynch on the Bloated Float since the room was too small for me to dodge his attacks. I managed every other fight at my normal difficulty, so beating Lynch on that lower difficulty just didn't feel as rewarding, even though I had no other choice.

That's why I specified I tend to make games harder than I need to since it's effectively the same concept. I can't beat it at the difficulty I'm aiming for, so I have to make it easier, and it doesn't feel as rewarding.

[Turtleswatter]

Originally posted by Shedding my mortal skin:

Originally posted by Turtleswatter:

Yet you talk about someone who may set the slider lower than your preferred setting as kind of cheap.

No, I was saying it feels cheap when I have to lower it for a fight. Like how just earlier, I had to lower probably 20% just to fight Lynch on the Bloated Float since the room was too small for me to dodge his attacks. I managed every other fight at my normal difficulty, so beating Lynch on that lower difficulty just didn't feel as rewarding, even though I had no other choice.

That's why I specified I tend to make games harder than I need to since it's effectively the same concept. I can't beat it at the difficulty I'm aiming for, so I have to make it easier, and it doesn't feel as rewarding.

Sorry, yeah I understand what you're saying now. Yes, sometimes you have to do that to just progress the game. But if you look at it, because the slider is there, you can set the game at a difficulty that might be a bit above your character's abilities with the knowledge that you've got a get out of jail free card if you misjudge. That's a great tool, not a failure :D