(Consistent with vanilla, but buggy) - custom spell / skill training costs

[mikeprichard]

I'm playing on Windows 11 with a very recent dev build (a41cbfb3), and have noticed a couple things which may or may not be bugs. I have a very light mod list, with none of the mods logically impacting these issues (Patch for Purists, Services Restored, Expansion Delay, Unofficial Morrowind Official Plugins Patched, Graphic Herbalism OpenMW Edition, Passive Healthy Wildlife, Talrivian's State-Based HP, Alex's 5 Per Attribute On Levelup, Multiple Teleport Marking OpenMW Vanilla). I haven't yet extensively tested either issue against vanilla in case the experienced players/devs here already know what's going on.

1) While this isn't mentioned in the related UESP spell pages for these specific spells, I've seen a fair number of spells that are significantly more expensive in terms of magicka costs when made as custom spells compared to their store-bought versions. For example, Almsivi and Divine Intervention cost 8 magicka when bought from a merchant, but the identical custom versions cost 18 magicka each. Ondusi's Open Door is also significantly cheaper magicka-wise than an identical 50-point on-touch custom Open spell (15 magicka vs. 30), as are Cure Common Disease (15 magicka vs. 37) and Cure Blight Disease (100 magicka vs. 250(!)). I've seen similar discrepancies with several other spells, though I can't recall them offhand right now. Does anyone know whether this is consistent with vanilla?

2) With 100 Disposition with all trainers and 100 Mercantile / full Fatigue on my character, there seems to be a very wide variation in skill training costs among various NPCs, apparently in large part (per the "getmercantile" console command) due to their widely varying Mercantile skill values; some higher-level trainers even have Mercantile skill of 10 or below (e.g. Qorwynn, Ajira, Estirdalin, etc.). Some trainers, for example, charge less than 100g per skill level even when training skills in the 90s. What's even stranger are the additional discrepancies: e.g. comparing Estirdalin and Marayn Dren as they stand right next to each other, both with 100 Disposition and 10 Mercantile skill, Estirdalin would charge 85g for Destruction/Alteration training when I'm already at skill 100, while Marayn would only charge 74g for these same skills. Meanwhile, Qorwynn, with a slightly lower 8 Mercantile skill per the console, also charges 74g. In general, does all this sound consistent with vanilla?

[mikeprichard]

UPDATE:
I've now tested the above examples on a new character in vanilla with only Tribunal/Bloodmoon loaded (i.e. with no mods), and the OpenMW behavior I saw above is identical to vanilla in all respects. So, these issues are consistent with vanilla, but - at least in the case of the spell cost issues above - nevertheless buggy in both vanilla and OpenMW. (That said, it seems this buggy stock-vs.-custom spell magicka cost issue - apparently caused at least in part by an "added 1-second duration" problem in spellmaking described both in the "Spell Cost" section of the UESP wiki "Spellmakers" page as well as in rot's 4-year-old post to the gitlab bug report - is already in process at https://gitlab.com/OpenMW/openmw/-/issues/3807... I had seen/posted in the report before, but forgot/didn't make the connection.) I also find it annoying that in order to get more efficient spells until this issue is fixed, I would need to use their store-bought versions in many important instances, meaning I'd be unable to rename the spells for convenience in the magic menu... bummer!

On the plus side, playing vanilla for even 15 minutes reminded me how excruciatingly painful the interface and overall experience is compared to OpenMW. I could never go back.