Day 13: More spells, wandering

I spent most of this session just exploring the area around the lake that Pelegiad overlooks, on a vague mission of looking around for some person that was mentioned in one of my quests. It's a large area, full of alchemical ingredients to harvest, and a few ancestral tombs and an "egg mine". I explored a bit of the mine, but not the whole thing (those eggs were getting heavy), and continued on around, meeting a fellow on the road who had a short quest to explore the area (which is what I was doing anyway) to find his lost friend. I thought he might have gone into a tomb I saw very close by, so I went in there expecting to have to find his friend's corpse. He wasn't in there, but there was a pretty unique encounter down there, which I won't spoil. But, this was my first combat test of the use of my new Life Tap spell.

Life Tap

As I explained before, I thought this would be good spell to port into Morrowind, to better balance the mana problem. The idea is a spell of negligable cost which converts an equal or semi-equal amount of your own health into mana. A dangerous thing to do in the heat of battle, of course, but that's what makes it so appealing for role-playing purposes. After casting that (several times if necessary), the warlock must regain health by draining it from an enemy. Since the in-game spellmaking made it prohibitively mana-expensive to cast, with no discount for the obvious cost to my own health, I had to make it in the CS. I'll demonstrate its use in a little video, and probably put the spell up on TES Nexus as a mod later.

The Drain Life spell can be made in-game just fine, though again, the mana cost doesn't make it very practical as a means of restoring your health, as it also comes with a large mana hit, whereas a simple healing spell like the Hearth Heal does not. I think I may just go ahead and create a low-cost, long-duration spell that leeches a small amount of health from the target while restoring a greater amount to you, just so it's more of a tactical move than a killer offensive spell. The reason WoW warlocks have to do it this way is because they have no healing spells -- just drain life, potions, and bandages. The reason I'm recreating it here is that I think it makes for a more interesting game mechanic for a certain kind of mage: endurance and fortification of health is either just as important or more important than intellect, because this way your own health can be used as a renewable supply of mana.