Morrowind Guide: Enchanting
Written By: Nick Arvites

Enchanting in a nutshell:

For starters, get some of the following:
Soul Gems
Weapons to enchant (steel is good to start out, but eventually move up to the Daedic stuff)
Spell of Soul Trap
Money, and lots of it
Clothes to enchant (use exquisite only)

First things first, you can enchant your own items without paying. To do so, go to a charged gem in your inventory and activate it. It will bring up a screen giving you the option of either making or recharging an item.

It should be warned that it takes an extremely high enchant skill to make items successfully. I have a level 55 enchant rating and can only make lower level weapons and items. You need a 90 for the good stuff.

What should you enchant first? Take a sword and give it a 10 or 20 charge soul trap enchantment. Use it as your opening attack weapon and switch to a different one. It saves you time with soul trapping and is useful if you're not a high magic user. It’s relatively cheap too.

Next thing to go with is a high-powered damage item. The damage health spell is a good one to use. This gets fairly expensive if you can't do it yourself. Use a better weapon while you're at it. I currently use a Daedric Katana with a 20-point damage health on strike. The weapon does something like 40 per hit to begin with, so I cut through rows of enemies easily now.

Side note: Say you can't afford any of this. Use the Creeper trick. Morrowind's major flaw is that there are no rich merchants. Go to Caldera and go to the manor near the armor shop that's filled with orcs. Find a scamp merchant in it. He restocks his 5000 gold limit every 24 hours. You have to sell 5000 bucks worth of stuff to him (if you have a 10,000 item, sell that, buy back 5000 worth of stuff, wait 24 hours and sell it back). Use him to sell expensive stuff to.

Clothing enchantments are useful. Now, what you ideally want is a constant effect item. How do you make one? You need the soul of either an ascended sleeper (found in 6th house bases...tough) or a golden saint (found outside of ruins and on mountaintops, rare and difficult to beat due to magical dispel abilities). Ok, get one of these potent souls and go to the enchanter.

Cheap trick: Not sure if they fixed it with a patch on PC, but it works in Xbox: Select the item you want, select the golden saint soul, select constant effect, go back to soul and switch it to a lesser soul. Congrats, you screwed the system and got a constant effect for the price of a rat soul. The soul still needs to match the spell cost though.

What's a useful constant effect?
1.) Chameleon - Think constant cloak, doesn't snap off like invisibility
2.) Sanctuary - Decreases chances of enemy hits of landing
3.) Water breathing - no more drowning
4.) Restore health/fatigue - expensive but extremely useful
5.) Fortify any ability

What's not useful as constant effects?
1.) Levitate: I have a set of levitate shoes I use when needed. As an everyday item, levitating gets annoying.
2.) Invisibility: it costs the same as a chameleon constant effect. Why doesn't it work? It wears off when you interact with the world, unlike chameleon. Say you're looting a shop. Say you pick up something. You become visible and people see you. Not good.

Where can you get your Enchant skill raised? The secret master is located at the Stronghold Indoranyon (located south of Tel Mora along the coast of the mainland). The guy's name is Qorwynn. He’s hard to find and gets expensive. You can also try to make enchanted items and recharge the items. To do this, activate a charged soul gem in the menu and pick whichever option you want. I don’t think you can fail a recharge, but you can easily fail creating an item.

Another extremely useful item you can obtain for enchanting is the gem named Azura’s Star. This is a re-usable soul gem that can hold any soul. Where do I get this? From Azura of course. Azura is a Daedric lord. You need to go to Azura’s shrine in the southeast corner of the continent. You can’t miss it. It’s the place with the giant stature of Azura. Enter the shrine and activate the statue. She gives you a quest to help settle a bet with another Daedric lord. You need to go to an isle north of Dagon Fel and clear out the enemies without going into the hut and disrupting her follower. Once you do this, report back to her with a ring you plucked off of a golden saint present on the island and she rewards you with the Azura’s Star. It’s a pain to do, but it is well worth it since the gem never disappears.

Hopefully this has helped some of you with the enchanting skill.

Posted: 8-21-02