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SPOILER INFO
No spoilers. This article contains information that is absolutely necessary to anyone who uses the mod SEO – Skyrim Economy Overhaul.
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I played a game of 380 hours, getting killed a number of times, as I'm sure everyone has. Time and again I found myself wondering how come I drank four health potions and it didn't seem to have a noticeable effect on my health. I didn't know the Skyrim rule that potion effects don't stack. That is, if you drink four health potions at the same time, you will get benefits from only one. The other three are simply wasted. I lost countless potions that way before I became suspicious and began to investigate. This has, of course, nothing to do with Skyrim Economy Overhaul. It is a feature of the vanilla game.
Now, potion effects not stacking is not necessarily a bad thing. It forces you to think more on tactics rather than simply stock up on potions. I just wish someone had warned me before, as I had never seen anything like that in a computer game.
During the first hundred hours of my next game, now aware of the potions not stacking, I found myself very frustrated with the impotency of health potions. Every now and then the Skyrim game throws at you an enemy who brings you below 25% of your health in a couple of seconds. You realize that you are being hit real bad, quickly press the letter I (for Inventory ) to gain some time for thinking... and realize you can't do anything. All the health potions you have restore only 30 or 40 points of health, which in your current situation is as good as nothing. And when you press Esc, Tab, click "Magic", choose the "Healing" spell, press Tab, left-click to activate the spell and left-click again to cast it, chances are that you are dead faster than you can heal yourself, the game reacting much slower than you are pressing the keys, so that often enough you realize only after a second or two that the game failed to register the key you just pressed, so you'll have to do it again – while the enemy who of course isn't subject to such delays, keeps hitting you.
In short, when you find yourself in a critical situation, there is often no way to heal yourself fast enough. The crucial question is – why do the health potions have to be so weak? I mean, if they stacked, it wouldn't matter, but when one health potion is all you can use, and it only restores 40 points of health – that's one or two hits with a sword. With 100-point health potions being very rare, and even 100 points being not all that helpful on higher levels, Skyrim is essentially a game without health potions. The ones that exist are more placebo than real help.
Or so I thought.
I started to wonder if it would be right for me to increase the magnitude of health potions with TES5Edit. On the one hand, it seems kind of cheaty. On the other hand, health potions restoring 10, 20, 30, 40 points of health are just plain ridiculous.
I knew that Skyrim Economy Overhaul changed the absurd vanilla potion names to understandable ones. That meant it had records for health potions. So I could alter those records with TES5Edit. In other words, it looked like I could edit the SEO entries in order to change the health potions' magnitude.
I opened the relevant TES5Edit entries. Imagine my shock when I found out that SEO had significantly decreased the potency of health potions from their vanilla values.
Let me make this very clear.
I WAS MISTAKEN TO THINK THAT SKYRIM HEALTH POTIONS ARE PATHETICALLY WEAK.
IN FACT, SKYRIM HAS PERFECTLY GOOD HEALTH POTIONS.
IT IS SKYRIM ECONOMY OVERHAUL THAT MAKES SKYRIM HEALTH POTIONS ABSURDLY WEAK.
I was angry as hell. I had played hundreds of hours unable to heal myself in critical situations, just because that skeever turd EnigManic had thought it would be a good idea to water the potions down. How I hated him!
Fortunately, the solution is easy with TES5Edit. Open the list of Digestibles and you will see the values given to them by SEO next to the right values given by skyrim.esm . Simply change each potion's magnitude in Economy Overhaul.esp to its vanilla value and voila, you have the proper health potions back.
I can confirm that it's perfectly safe to make such changes. The game works exactly as before, only the health potions' magnitude is what it should be.
For those who are not yet confident using TES5Edit, the relevant records are:
ALCH:0003EADD
changed by SEO from 25 to 10
ALCH:0003EADE
changed by SEO from 50 to 20
ALCH:0003EADF
changed by SEO from 75 to 30
ALCH:0003EAE3
changed by SEO from 100 to 40
ALCH:00039BE4
changed by SEO from 150 to 50
ALCH:00039BE5
changed by SEO from 9999 to 100
After giving it some thought, I changed the magnitudes to 10-30-70-150-310-630, which makes more sense to me than the vanilla magnitudes. I also adjusted their prices correspondingly. SEO makes health potions very cheap, which is understandable as their effects are negligible. But when you correct their potency, you might want to correct their prices as well.
Also watered down by SEO are:
Potions of Magicka starting with ALCH:0003EAE0
Potions of Stamina starting with ALCH:0003EAE5
Other potion magnitudes are not affected by SEO, but I took the opportunity to make Strength Elixirs (increase carryweight) stronger so that they would actually be useful. (I mean, 20 pounds more or less will never make a real difference.)
The morale of the story is: it's not always the stupid Bethesda. Sometimes it's a stupid mod author. I wonder if he meant it as a perverse joke on the users or he actually thinks that it's good to have placebo instead of useful health potions.
Now, some may say that, mods being a free gift to the community, I have no right to use such strong words. Well, that would be true if the mod's name were Skyrim Economy Overhaul and Useless Health Potions. But the mod is called Skyrim Economy Overhaul. E‑C‑O‑N‑O‑M‑Y. Health potion strength has nothing to do with economy. There is no warning about that largely-game-ruining side effect. If the mod description contained something like "Beware! This mod makes health potions so weak that they will be virtually useless" in big red letters, I would have no complaints. But the fact is that the mod description is all about item prices, merchant inventories, also mentioning money supply and training costs. There is not one word, not the vaguest hint that the mod affects the effects of potions in any way. (I re-checked before re-publishing this article, that is in April 2019, and the description is still the same as it was, last updated in April 2015.)
That's why I have the right to point out how the author of SEO is fucking up his unsuspecting users' games, and I have the right to call it an outrage even though I am not a paying customer. When someone gives you a beautiful balloon as a gift and fails to warn you that it contains poisonous gas, it is not acceptable behavior.
[originally published 2017-04-04]
