Morrowind Class Build Guide

A guide on how to build a useful class for your Morrowind playthrough.

Preface

This build guide is not perfect. I have not played every combination of skills and attributes; these are simply my suggestions based on what I have played. These are all suggestions, and nothing more. It is perfectly okay to experiment with skills other than what was listed here. There is no "right" or "wrong" way to build your character. What's most important is making a character that is tailored to how you want to play, and making sure it is a character you'll have fun with.

Attributes

The attributes all influence your stats. Here is a list of how each attribute effects you:

Strength: Attack damage, carry weight, starting health, starting fatigue

Intelligence: Amount of magicka, potion potency

Willpower: Spell success/fail chance, paralysis and silence resistance, maximum fatigue

Agility: Hit success/fail chance, dodge chance, ability to use sneak, ability to use security, ability to block, maximum fatigue, staggering resistance

Speed: Movement speed

Endurance: Maximum health, maximum fatigue, fatigue regeneration speed

Personality: NPC opinion of you, persuasion ability, bargaining ability

Luck: General higher success chance on most success/fail chance rolls

Combat Builds

For your "Favorite Attributes," you do not want to pick anything other than Strength, Agility, and Endurance.

For your "Major Skills," always add Heavy Armor and Long Blade, as most of the powerful gear in the game fall into these categories. Security is a necessity, as with your low magicka, Alteration magic will be of little use. Mysticism is heavily recommended as well, as it will allow you to teleport.

For your "Minor Skills," you can pretty much add anything that sounds interesting to you. I would recommend taking an extra armour type, extra weapon type, Athletics, Acrobatics, Speechcraft, or Mysticism (if you didn't take it for a Major Skill), but these won't have a large impact on your character.

Magic Builds

For your "Favorite Attributes," always take Intelligence and Willpower.

For your "Major Skills," always take Destruction, Alteration, Mysticism, and any weapon type. I recommend using your last slot for Alchemy, as potions are required to regenerate magicka. If you choose to use it for something else, then I recommend Illusion, Conjuration, Restoration, or an armour type.

For your "Minor Skills," always take the remaining schools of magic that you didn't pick as Major Skills. If you didn't pick an armour type as a major, then select one as a minor. Your last slot doesn't matter as much, and can be anything that sounds appealing. Some skills I would recommend would be Acrobatics, Athletics, Enchanting, or Speechcraft, but these won't have a large impact on your character.

Stealth Builds

For your "Favorite Attributes," Agility is a necessity, and I would also recommend either Strength, Luck, Personality, Endurance or Speed, depending on your preference.

For your "Major Skills," always take Sneak, Security, Short Blade, and Light Armor. For your last slot, I would recommend either Acrobatics or Athletics.

For your "Minor Skills," I would recommend either Acrobatics or Athletics (if not taken as a Major Skill), Personality, Marksman, Mysticism, or Restoration.

Dabbler Build

The last build I have to suggest is meant to be a sort of jack-of-all-trades build, and is meant to dabble in different areas from each of the classes, as to show how someone might decide to blend different aspects of each class to fit their playstyle. For that purpose, I will provide my reasoning for each of these as well.

For your "Specialization," I recommend Magic.

For your "Favorite Attributes," I recommend Strength and Willpower. Strength will give you good health, carry weight, fatigue, and hit damage, as I highly recommend using physical weapons in a jack-of-all-trades build. Willpower grants some resistances and increased fatigue, but most importantly allows you to have decent spell success chance.

For your "Major Skills," I recommend Alteration, Alchemy, Long Blade, Mysticism, and Heavy Armor. Alteration will allow you to use magic to get around things like locks, or the need to use Alchemy to make potions for levitation, water walking, and water breathing. Alteration is better for locks than Security is, as Security needs to level to be able to unlock high level locks, while Alteration spells will work as soon as you have the ability to cast them. Alchemy will allow you to craft potions to keep your health, magicka, and fatigue bars full. Long Blade will give you a large variety of weapons to choose from, and access to some of the strongest in the game. Mysticism will allow you to teleport easily, among other things. Finally, Heavy Armor will give you access to the best armour in the game, and your high Strength will allow you to carry it without issues.

For your "Minor Skills," I recommend Speechcraft, Acrobatics, Athletics, Block, and Enchanting. A high Speechcraft will negate the need for Illusion to gain high disposition with an NPC, and can save you from spending gold to bribe them. Acrobatics and Athletics together will significantly increase your mobility, as your running and jumping will make you travel much faster than you would otherwise. Block will let you use shields to reduce chance of being hit. Lastly, Enchanting will allow you to enchant gear that can boost all of your other skills and stats.

[Officer Grapes]

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[mikdvs444]

I wouldn't recommend unarmoured, even with the unofficial patch it seems to be glitched and will not work with at least one piece of armour. Personally I like getting a high armour rating whilst building my endurance

[Blizzinc :3]

A strong note is how attributes are affected by what skills youve leveled, if you put all the skills you want to use as your major and minor skills you will level up every 10 skill increases and get the minimum amount of attribute increase per level. Also Endurance maxing is always broken as endurance affects how much health you receive per level up as well as your starting health and this health is not recoverable by getting endurance later in your runs.

[Karina]

In early game you will get more protection from unarmored then common heavy or medium armors, and save greatly on weigth.

[Doing_randomthings]

how bout jack of all traides

[Khirman]

One major issue that I see is that you suggest Acrobatics and Athletics as Major or Minor skills. Even if you don't particularly care about optimal leveling, you absolutely do not want either of these as a skill that will affect your level. Otherwise, you level up way faster than you should.

[Smilingdeath]

You can get the disposition of an NPC as high as you want in a single visit. Sell the NPC 1 item worth 1 gold. Click out of the barter screen, then reopen it and buy the 1 gold item back. Repeat as often as you want to raise their disposition from that visit. If you close the chat screen it will reset.
Great for getting an NPC to like you enough to give you any quest items for free, as long as you can barter with them.

[The Flying Rodent]

Hey mate, like the guide and builds! Attributes/Skills are nicely summarised, and a few important points are highlighted (such as Security/Mysticism/Alteration being useful utility skills on just about any character).

If I had some nitpicks:

1. I'd emphasise Endurance's importance a little more, as it effects maximum health of your character. Perhaps Spear could be selected on a build or two.

2. On your 'dabbler build', I'd be tempted to swap Enchant for Restoration. Enchant as a skill is basically useless unless it is trained or fortified to extremely high levels, and is additionally a pain to increase naturally. Restoration meanwhile is useful right off the bat, particularly for Restore Health and Restore Fatigue spells.

[Amyrha]

Also I can't recommend against sir.tristan_lang's build enough, it sounds like a miserable time.

There's not really any good reason to take personality as a main stat other than roleplay. I wouldn't really recommend barter or speechcraft as a major skill for any build. If you're playing a mage, I recommend still taking an armour skill, as there's not much of a downside to using it. If you're following his logic for getting alchemy ingredients, then barter and speechcraft are completely unnecessary, because if you keep buying a bunch of ingredients from someone, they like you pretty fast anyway.

[Amyrha]

I'm not really sure what you mean about paying someone else to do it. Enchant is definitely worth it though. Making money is very easy in Morrowind, and combining that with Enchant lets you create insanely powerful constant effect items. Something as small as a Restore Fatigue ring could make a huge difference.