Marked for Death shout…made even worse and totally useless! Deliberate or not?

[Adella]

Hello everyone, I’m not sure where to ask this question. Idk if it is USSEP thing or a Bethesda ruination.

Marked for Death was woafully weak…but it could kill a skeleton or base bandit on Legendary.  Suddenly it has been changed it seems, and no longer does any health damage at all.

What you get now is a pitiful approx 1% health drain effect on npcs which fully recover once the shout wears off.  It can’t even counter a Troll’s natural health regen rate.  It is now a completely pointless and useless shout.

I’d like to know if it is a USSEP change or some nonsense Bethesda has pulled.

Any info gratefully received…Oh and I am on XB1S, SE not AE

A.

[Altbert]

Hi Adella,

I have taken a look at the associated magic effects of this shout, but nothing has changed, only Update.esm changed the magic effect data and added the Recover flag. I'm on PC with SSE 1.6.640, latest update with the AE DLC. No idea about XB1S, but should be the same, I think.

[Arthmoor]

The addition of that Recover flag is the fix for the shout. It was grossly overpowered before that and it's one of the oldest bugs that had ever been reported for the game. Why they ended up choosing now to fix it, who knows, but that's the fix and USSEP no longer contains this edit since we don't need it anymore.

[phatbassanchor]

18 hours ago, Adella said:

Hello everyone, I’m not sure where to ask this question. Idk if it is USSEP thing or a Bethesda ruination.

Marked for Death was woafully weak…but it could kill a skeleton or base bandit on Legendary.  Suddenly it has been changed it seems, and no longer does any health damage at all.

What you get now is a pitiful approx 1% health drain effect on npcs which fully recover once the shout wears off.  It can’t even counter a Troll’s natural health regen rate.  It is now a completely pointless and useless shout.

I’d like to know if it is a USSEP change or some nonsense Bethesda has pulled.

Any info gratefully received…Oh and I am on XB1S, SE not AE

A.

Beloved Adella darling...  It's been far too long.  Hope you are well.  

Adventure ever on dear friend, Phat

[Sigurð Stormhand]

9 hours ago, Arthmoor said:

The addition of that Recover flag is the fix for the shout. It was grossly overpowered before that and it's one of the oldest bugs that had ever been reported for the game. Why they ended up choosing now to fix it, who knows, but that's the fix and USSEP no longer contains this edit since we don't need it anymore.

We should expand on this a bit. The reason the Recover flag is needed is because without it the shout permanently damages the target's armour rating. My thought is that early during Skyrim's development this shout damaged armour durability, like in Oblivion or Morrowind, but when armour durability was removed they tried to achieve the same affect and ended up with the bug that cripples Lydia if you hit her by accident.

[Adella]

Thank you all for responding.  
Hmmm, so this flag does nothing but allow ruined armour to self repair when the shout expires?

Which is not what I am seeing, so I have something else going on.  
When an npc is extremely low on health and on their knee..it is usual for all npcs to heal to about 5%, then they stand up and attack again…right, we all get that!

So shouting MfD at said weakened npc would continuously deplete the last of their health and finish them….This no longer happens.  The MfD shout makes no difference to the npc self healing.  So you can not kill with MfD now.

Shouting at a healthy npc simply reduces their health a total of a couple of per cent until the shout expires…*MfD no longer does damage over time*.  In my game at least.

I don’t know if it still even temporarily ruins armour rating, but it is moot since many foes have no armour anyway (eg. spiders) and use ‘damage resistance’ instead.

This is extremely disappointing…MfD no longer even kills a basic skeleton.

Is this because I have not installed AE?

[Altbert]

You could use SSEEdit to see if any of the magic effects related to the shout have been altered by a mod in addition to the changes in Update.esm. Look for magic effects VoiceMarkedForDeathHealthEffect01/02 (Editor IDs 0010319C and 0010319D). If you can use SSEEdit of course, as I am not familiar with the XBox.

[Arthmoor]

It's been awhile since I actually used this shout in a playthrough but I don't recall it having any ability to actually kill an NPC. You still had to deliver the finishing blow yourself.

[Adella]

Ah…it has been….some time!

I thought I might follow up on Art’s last comment.

I almost never utilised MfD for its armour degrading effect with USSEP in effect, because the armour reduction was so weak that a substantial weapon would kill the foe anyway with or without MfD.  No…the fun bit was the health damage (not drain notice, damage). Three words provided 3 pts/sec damage for half a minute iirc…That’s 90 points total.  A single shout of MfD would kill a wolf, skeleton or base bandit with no further action required.  It would take 20-30 seconds, bandits dropped to a knee before keeling over.  You could ‘soak’ several in a group and await their doom.

Being a Damage effect meant if a single application was not enough, successive shouts would eventually take them.  Trolls would not die directly from MfD, but it countered and negated their health regen, enabling much a easier conventional weapon kill while MfD was active. Bandits above Outlaw had far too much health for MfD to kill them in any reasonable timeframe so we never used it for those.

The recent changes to MfD are most disappointing….There is no usable health damage over time shout available now…Don’t mention ‘Drain Vitality’.  That is even weaker than MfD was, complete waste of time.  Only dragons have an effective DV shout in Legendary play (and no, we aren’t dropping back to Adept just to get shouts to work, it will ruin immersive play).

Shouting Ice Form WILL provide that 3 points per second health damage will foes are frozen, BUT how boring when they can’t run around in death throws!

What we need is a shout like 10,000 rads radiation…which MfD mimicked, motled purpley and dying in a minute or so…without an over long cooldown. 
 

IMO….The voice of Dragonborn SHOULD have such a destructive effect on the flesh of mere mortals huh!

A.

[Sigurð Stormhand]

With Bethesda having eventually applied the same fix as USSEP I think it's clear that Marked For Death was not working as intended, and was instead badly bugged. That's not to say it's working as originally intended now, but at least it isn't bugged like it was.

My interpretation of the way the shout is coded in the original game is that it was originally intended to work like a "break armour" spell in Oblivion or Morrowind, which would damage armour's durability until it became completely ineffective. The problem is that Skyrim, in its final form, lacks a concept of durability - so the Shout was shifted to damage the armour rating instead. The person who coded it originally probably assumed that the armour rating would recover automatically, or couldn't be permanently degraded, in the same was as health can be regenerated despite being damaged.

Unfortunately, the game code doesn't work like that.

[Adella]

Ignoring the drain armour rating effect….because I never used it for that anyway, my point was the health damage, although small was useful and amusing.

That has now become a health drain instead, and health therefore recovers upon cessation of the shout!  THAT is what so disappoints.  
I could find a mod I expect, that would provide a direct and permanent health ruin by shout…I am aware a poison shout does exist even for console.  However, I try to keep the game mechanics vanilla for the sake of worthy endeavour.

I just wanted to air that grievance, not that it will influence I’m sure!

Thank you for your response…

A.

[ikonomov]

On 3/21/2023 at 8:07 PM, Adella said:

I just wanted to air that grievance, not that it will influence I’m sure!

Thank you for your response…

A.

Adella!  So nice to see you again.   

I agree about the shout, the health damage was a nice mechanic.  Unfortunately because of the permanent armor damage it was a well known exploit being able to do enormous damage by getting the armor rating values negative.  I guess you can't have the health damage without the bug, but as long as you have not updated the game and your mods after the AE update I don't see why anything would have changed.  As noted here prior to 1.6.629.0.8 you should have USSEP handle the fix, while after the update it would be fixed by the official patch.

Speaking of AE, let me share my own experience with it.  Initially when released I was utterly disgusted by it.  I looked through the new changes and additions and I did not like a single little thing.  I thought that in a way Bethesda have finally managed to ruin the whole game by inserting mediocre content, things that I simply did not see being the same quality as the original material.  After some careful consideration, however, I decided to update because of three reasons.  First, most of the new content is actually easy to completely avoid in the game.  None of it is even consequential to the gameplay or story in the least.  The second reason is mod updates.  While a few mods will probably not ever make it to v1.6 the majority of them have been updated and are not compatible with v1.5 anymore.  The modding community is still going strong with people still making new content, and by staying on SE you effectively isolate yourself from it.  A third reason is that despite Beth's stupidity to update a 10 years old game, it seems that they did manage to actually improve game stability by using a new compiler.

I've been a bit busy with two other ancient games, but I'm nearly done with them.  I can't wait to get back to Tamriel!

Edited May 17, 2023 by ikonomov