Morrowind Guide: Custom Classes
Written By: Nick Arvites

So you want a custom class?

First step: It is semi-helpful to pick a race with bonuses that suit your play style, but it is not necessary.

Major and Minor skills:

1. Pick one weapon class and stick with it. It’s wasteful to use more than one or two skill slots on weaponry.
2. Pick one armor class and stick with it. It’s extremely wasteful to select more than one armor class.
3. Unless you are making a wizard, don’t spend too many skill slots on magic schools.

Lets rank the skills:

Block: C+ While its nice to have built up if you use shields, using it as a major or minor skill would be wasteful if you found a nice two handed weapon.

Armorer: B+ Repairing your weapons and armor yourself is a great skill to have that will pay for itself when you get the levels up.

Medium Armor: F: Sorry, I have no love for medium armor. It does not have the lightweight and mobility of light armor and does not have the protection of heavy armor. Wasteful to use long term.

Heavy Armor: A: Provides lots of protection but adds a lot of weight to your packs.

Blunt Weapons: C: They’re ok, not the greatest stuff in the world.

Long Blade: A: Tons of weapon choices here, be it katanas, long swords, claymores, dia-katanas, and sabers.

Axe: B: Good damage.

Spear: C: Why use spears? There are better things out there

Athletics: A: Helps running and swimming without getting as tired.

Destruction: B: Attack spells

Alteration: B: Levitating and other similar effects

Illusion: C: Chameleon is found in this school...arguably one of the better stealth spells

Conjuration: D: Summoning weapons that disappear? Lame.

Mysticism: C: Has the soul trap spell

Restoration: B: Healing. Nuff said.

Enchant: B: Only really useful if you can train it high enough.

Alchemy: C: Make your own potions

Unarmored: D: Good idea...but why?

Security: A+: Extremely important. Governs lock picking

Sneak: B-: Important if you want to move around without being seen

Acrobatics: A: If this skill is built up enough, jumping gets you around quicker than running.

Light Armor: A: How can this get an A? Well, initially, this armor class bites. Once you find a suit of glass armor, everything changes.

Short Blade: B+: Decent weapon choice

Marksman: D: Too much of a pain to learn. Most people don’t want to deal with it.

Mercantile: C: Helps you talk merchants down in prices, but becomes irrelevant once you start finding all of the good stuff.

Speechcraft: A: Having a way with words will get you far and save you the money in bribes.

Hand to hand: D: Good in extremely high levels, but you can’t enchant and you’ll probably not make it out the first town.

Making the Class:

Pick your weapon style. This should be your first major skill. If you decide on using bows, pick a second skill as a minor skill (like short blades) because you may run out of arrows or get frustrated with bows.

Pick your armor style. Heavy is the best armor to start off with. It offers you enough padding so you won’t die off the first hit, but it is expensive and heavy. You may want to select light armor and try to "aquire" (meaning steal) a suit of glass armor. Glass armor is ultra-light and provides surprisingly high levels of protection. Do not even bother with medium armor. To be blunt, it sucks.

I would heavily recommend fitting in Security as a minor skill because lock picking can be important in this game. Sneak is really helpful if you like looting every place in sight, but if you’re not going to be a thieving character, you can hold off on it.

Block is a good skill if you’re planning on being a melee fighter.

If you are going to be a magic user, do not just select all of the schools of magic and be done with it. That is stupid. Select a melee weapon style, an armor style, and then fill up the rest of your majors/minors with spell schools and anything else you may need.

Acrobatics is great to have a specialization because it levels up easily if you jump often. Once the skill starts to rise, jumping around like a toad is faster than walking.

Overall, select the skills that appeal to your playing style. If you want to steal everything, you want stealth and security as your major skills. If you want to be a melee fighter, you want heavy armor, some sort of weapon (I’d suggest long swords or axes) and block. Magic users are more complex. You can make an melee attack mage/thieve if you want. Custom classes are great once you tinker with them for a while. You may find after you make a class that you will have to restart the game because the class isn’t working out or you didn’t balance your stats. If you don’t want to learn by trial and error, you may be better off with the preset classes.

Hope this helped.

Posted: 8-21-02