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Get something that makes it easier and more convenient to store/transport lots of loot at once, like Bag Of Holding. Oblivion is not like its previous two installments in that regard; in Daggerfall you could access your wagon from the exit of the dungeon without leaving it and thus could transfer loot without resetting the dungeon. You could also go to your ship (yes, you could have a ship in Daggerfall) from anywhere outside and stash stuff below deck, and you could teleport. These things make it faster and less tedious to get and keep a stash going.

In Morrowind, you can just dump your excess weight on a corpse near the entrance and when you're done with the dungoen you grab the pile, Recall to your storage area and make yourself not over-encumbered again. That's if you don't abuse one of a few ways to jack your encumbrance up to ludicrous levels.

In Oblivion? You have jack shit. The amount of loot you can get in a dungeon can easily weigh many times your free space and you have no way to teleport, no wagon or pack mule to stuff vendor trash in and though Fortify Strength/Feather effects help, they aren't really strong enough or last nearly long enough to support a few dungeon crawls before having to stash loot somewhere - and if you're in a place where every other weapon weighs like 80 pounds you're in trouble.

Believe me, you do not want to have to go through the tedium of making nine three round trips just to make sure that all vendor trash is accounted for. Mod out the FedEx pain of carting multiple Daedric Cuirassees back and forth (A single Daedric Cuirass weighs sixty fucking feathers. The highest natural encumbrace you can get is 500. Yeah.).

You'll also want the fix for the Reference Bug if you have Shivering Isles. If it's not patched out it will bite your ass and tear huge chunks out.

The problem with encumbrance in Oblivion is that 99% of the stuff you collect will be utter shit, but you still feel a need to collect it anyway. In vanilla Oblivion, to get the mercantile skill maxed out takes a bullshit long time to get, and it's not even that useful anyway. I tried playing Oblivion and it's horrible skill system and bland world and inhabitants just burned me out. It's a very pretty game, and combat can be fun, but it just bores the shit out of me with the way it is in vanilla. It's a game that needs to be modded.

Stofsk wrote:The problem with encumbrance in Oblivion is that 99% of the stuff you collect will be utter shit, but you still feel a need to collect it anyway. In vanilla Oblivion, to get the mercantile skill maxed out takes a bullshit long time to get, and it's not even that useful anyway.

Almost everything you collect can be sold (with the exception of Clutter), and though money isn't really that useful late game, you'll still want a healthy cash supply for things like spellmaking, enchanting, buying houses and their upgrades, and ingredients. Ingredients are ALWAYS worth the effort they take to acquire, if only because a Master Alchemist can take a Carrot costing 2 gold and turn it into a potion that's worth 56 gold. Of course, homebrew potions and poisons are more useful, when made properly, than their vanilla stock counterparts.

Stofsk wrote:It's a game that needs to be modded.

QFT. One bullshit change they made is only being able to train five times per level. Hope you didn't Major in Mercantile! But if you did, take heart: There's a mod for that.

Eulogy wrote:

Stofsk wrote:The problem with encumbrance in Oblivion is that 99% of the stuff you collect will be utter shit, but you still feel a need to collect it anyway. In vanilla Oblivion, to get the mercantile skill maxed out takes a bullshit long time to get, and it's not even that useful anyway.

Almost everything you collect can be sold (with the exception of Clutter), and though money isn't really that useful late game, you'll still want a healthy cash supply for things like spellmaking, enchanting, buying houses and their upgrades, and ingredients. Ingredients are ALWAYS worth the effort they take to acquire, if only because a Master Alchemist can take a Carrot costing 2 gold and turn it into a potion that's worth 56 gold.

It's almost as if the leveling system isn't the only thing that's broken.

One day I might try the major mods people have mentioned like FCOM or OOmod.

Of course, homebrew potions and poisons are more useful, when made properly, than their vanilla stock counterparts.

Drain health is great for this although I might be remembering the spell which could get you massive effects for comparatively low spell cost. Enchanting a sword with drain health and soul steal makes you feel like you're wielding stormbringer. But I also used poisons all the time as a damage multiplier on my weapons.

What makes Drain Health so powerful is that, like all other drain effects, it has a duration and vanishes thereafter. Also, it doesn't stack. This makes drain effects much less dangerous than damage effects.
But the thing is that practically everything below a certain level has less than 100 health. And if your health get's drained to zero - well, then you're dead. So a 1 second 100 health drain effect will kill everything below a certain level - and death is not a reversible status effect.

The FCOM mod, combines OOO, MMM, and others, my friend swears by it, but it is complicated to install manually. My friend downloaded it off this torrent, in case you want to give it a try. Combines the 15 step process.

http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/5611069 ... _omod_pack

Serafina wrote:What makes Drain Health so powerful is that, like all other drain effects, it has a duration and vanishes thereafter. Also, it doesn't stack. This makes drain effects much less dangerous than damage effects.
But the thing is that practically everything below a certain level has less than 100 health. And if your health get's drained to zero - well, then you're dead. So a 1 second 100 health drain effect will kill everything below a certain level - and death is not a reversible status effect.

With Drain Health being a super cheap effect, and if you stick it on a weapon with a weakness to magic effect... Well, the weakness effect will affect the next one, and the next, and the next... And those will increase the drain amount. A dagger with that set up and a soul trap makes for an obscenely powerful weapon.