Are all skills maintained as a % of your max pool or just the stamina ones.

loudent · April 2014

I was playing a two handed specialist was always running low on stamina so I started putting some points into it. However, I never really *felt* the difference. I realized that every time my stamina pool increased, the cost of my abilities increased to be certain % of my pool size.

This is crazy! Adding points to stamina was making my character weaker. I realized I was better to NOT put points in my stamina pool and instead focus on stamina cost reduction and stamina regen. This is bass ackwards! This is back to the metagaming that some of the SP elder scrolls is famous for. i.e. the best stamina fighters will be the one with NO points in stamina.

Is this true for all skills, including magicka ones or just a few select stamina based skills?

nerevarine1138 · April 2014

I don't believe it's a percent of your pool, but I'm pretty sure that ability costs scale with level. You'd have to check somewhere like Tamriel Foundry or ESOHead to see if that's the case, though.

Thete · April 2014

In cases like this, abilities are often a percentage of your base pool, so shouldn't include any bonuses you assign or have on your gear.

nudel · April 2014

The points don't just increase the cost, they also increase the effectiveness of the spell/feat. Bolded numbers are the ones that change. Depending on the skill this could increase damage, increase healing, etc. Along with this increase in the skill's ability comes a necessary increase in cost. Part of balancing the game really. Points in Stam/ Mag will also increase the Stam/Mag recovery slightly. You can see all this in the character sheet when you commit to a point. Given that the skills become exponentially more effective based on your resource pool, I do not agree with the OP that the most effective mage/ warrior will be the one with no point sin Mag/ Stam.

Cost reduction is one of the more reliable ways to aid resource management. There are a number of passives that do this well. Jewelry enchantments can also be used as well as some set bonuses. However, no amount of reduction/ recovery is going to nullify the need to manage your resources completely. Nor should it considering there are no cooldowns and resource management is the only way to limit how many skills you can fire off in a short time period.