Enchanting Tips
- 1 of 12: Read page 39 of the manual for the basics about enchanting, then read on in these hints for some advanced facts and tips.
- 2 of 12: First of all, I advise you to always pay a professional enchanter to do your enchantings for you instead of trying to train up your Enchant skill and do it all yourself. There are too many failures that way, and you can never do the really hot top-level constant effect enchantments (unless you use the tip in the next hint). The only problem with paying a pro to do it is that it costs a whole lot of money, especially for the really good stuff. Before you buy any expensive enchanted items, be sure to get your Mercantile skill trained way up, and only enchant when your fatigue bar is full and the enchanter's disposition toward you is 100. Also, always enchant with Miun-Gei in his shop in Vivec's Foreign Quarter Lower Waistworks -- he charges a bit less than all the others.
- 3 of 12: If you really want to do all of your enchanting yourself, pay Miun-Gei to make an item that can fortify your Enchant skill by 400 points when used (see below). Chug powerful Fortify Intelligence potions you made using the Potion-Making Tips until your Intelligence is at least 4,000, then use your Enchant-enhancing item and do your top-level enchanting. Or if you can afford to make two Enchant-enhancing items, you won't need any Intelligence boost. (You also don't need an Intelligence boost if you've only got one Enchant-enhancing item and are doing lower-level enchantments.)
- 4 of 12: If you want to do a lot of soultrapping, get a cheap weapon of your favorite type and turn it into an enchanted weapon that casts the Soultrap spell for 2 seconds every time it strikes. That nicely automates the soultrapping process. Just ready your new enchanted weapon and whack a monster with it until it dies. If the soul gem you used to make the weapon wasn't too cheap, then the weapon can be used a bunch of times before it has to recharge. (Note that with tougher monsters, you can knock their hit points way down with a more powerful weapon, then switch to your cheap Soultrap weapon to finish them off.)
- 5 of 12: And don't forget that to actually trap a monster's soul, you not only have to kill it while it's under the influence of a Soultrap spell, but you also have to have an empty soul gem that's high-quality enough to hold its soul. Soul gems range from petty (can only hold things like rats and mudcrabs) to grand (can hold anything up through Golden Saints and Ascended Sleepers). There are a few merchants who have some soul gems to sell, but most of them will be obtained in treasure you loot from towns and dungeons. See the link below to learn where you can find several of the best kind of soul gem.
- 6 of 12: The list of magic effects you can put on an enchanted item depends on what spells you've learned. See the Spell Finding hint section for a list of where to get all the spell types.
- 7 of 12: Once you save up a fair pile of money (and train your Mercantile skill way up high), you should go to an enchanter and have every nonmagical item you regularly wear enchanted with something, even if it's only a cheap little enchantment that adds 1 to an attribute or gives a few points of Night Eye for seeing better in dark areas. Since enchantments are always expensive, try to only use the very best items for them so that you won't be redoing them later on.
- 8 of 12: Once you're able to trap the souls of the two most powerful monsters (Golden Saints and Ascended Sleepers), you should start making items that have constant effects on them. For instance, you can enchant exquisite-quality rings and amulets to have constant Fortify Attribute effects of up to +24. Also, these effects stack, so you could make two exquisite rings of Strength +24 and wear both of them, increasing your Strength by 48 as long as the rings are worn.
- 9 of 12: A bad feature you need to watch out for when you're trying to put more than one effect on a constant effect enchanted item is that adding a second effect will double the enchantment point cost of the first one. This means that you should put the cheaper enchantment on first. For instance, if you're enchanting an exquisite ring to have constant effects of Restore Health 4 points and Restore Fatigue 2 points, you have to put the Restore Fatigue effect on first. It only costs 10 points (20 when doubled), but the Restore Health effect costs 100 points (200 if doubled). So the total is 10*2+100 = 120 points if you put the Restore Fatigue on first, and 100*2+10 = 210 points if you put it on second. Weird, but true!
- 10 of 12: Another note about soul gems is that the amount of charge your finished item will have (if it's a "Cast When Used" or "Cast When Strikes" item) is equal to the charge in the soul gem you used to create the item. So even if you don't *need* a Golden Saint or Ascended Sleeper soul gem to create an item, it's still a good idea to use one so your item will have a charge of 400 instead of some lesser number.
- 11 of 12: The original unpatched version of the game has two useful enchanting-related bugs in it.
- 12 of 12: Here's a list of some of the most useful enchanted items I've been able to make.
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