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Ultimate Odahviing

Makes Odahviing extremely powerful instead of useless.

Skyrim Nexus Page[skyrim.nexusmods.com]

Also check out my other mod, Ultimate Durnehviir

THE PREMISE:

In vanilla Skyrim, I was always really disappointed with how lame Odahviing was in fights. He hit enemies with all the power of an overgrown mosquito. This is caused by the fact that he uses the same attacks enemy dragons do. Enemy dragon attacks are naturally balanced to player health, whereas at higher levels and especially on master or legendary difficulties, enemies tend to have much higher relative health than the player.

This mod gives Odahviing his own unique dragon breath attacks that deal massive amounts of damage and greatly amplifies his melee damage as well. I wanted to make Odahviing feel as dangerous to enemies as high-level dragons feel to the player. He is now able to roast all but the most powerful enemies in a single blast of breath, even on legendary difficulty. I enjoy playing with mods that add increased spawns and large battles around the overworld, so Odahviing now becomes well worth the shout cooldown necessary to summon him, able to decimate entire groups of enemies and singlehandedly turn the tide of a battle in your favor.

HOW IT WORKS:

All this mod does is stops Odahviing from using the abilities of the generic leveled fire dragon he uses as his actor base and gives him new ones I made instead that behave in the exact same way, but deal in excess of 1000 damage each, way overkill for most weaker or low-level enemies, but just enough to still be able to take out enemies with the highest health. Remember that he tends to do a lot of flying around, so when he does attack, you want it to count. His melee damage modifier is quite high as well, so you'll be able to enjoy seeing him do killmoves on weaker humanoid enemies fairly frequently if he gets within bite range of them.

Now all that damage obviously spells instant death for the player and friendly NPCs if they're hit by it, so I've taken a couple measures to prevent this from happening. First and foremost Odahviing is now a member of the Player faction, meaning he should have all the same friend/ally relationships that you do. For instance, if you're fighting a group of bandits with some guards or Imperial/Stormcloak soldiers helping you and Odahving flies over and blasts you all with fire breath, only the bandits will be killed by it while the guards stay alive and friendly towards you. This change only affects Odahviing's actor info, and does not actually modify an entry for the player faction, so you don't worry about compatibility with any other mods that alter it. As an additional contingency, I've added conditions to his breath shouts that makes them unable to do any damage to either the player or anyone in the CurrentFollowerFaction. So if you use follower mods for multiple followers, they will all be 100% safe from Odahviing.

Finally, I've implemented additional functionality into his breath attacks that makes the initial fight with him at Dragonsreach work normally, so you can use this mod on a new character even before you beat the main quest. His breath attacks will still be able to damage you during the fight, but they will not be one-shot kills. They will be scaled to your level instead. I implemented about 5 different tiers of breath scaling ranging from level 15 to 50 with values I thought were appropriate. Note that if you are playing on legendary the damage will be quite high (it will hit for roughly 300 fire damage once you're above level 50 and is unaffected by your fire resistance), but on lower difficulties even weaker characters without healing spells should be able to survive long enough to trap him. This player-scaling damage gets disabled once you complete the quest and his breath attacks switch over to being balanced for obliterating enemies. There are no scripts involved with this so don't worry, it's all done through conditions placed on the spell effects.

COMPATIBILITY:

I designed this mod to be compatible with literally any other mod out there with no conflicts. Odahviing is the only existing actor modified by this .esp. I highly recommend you use this mod in conjunction with Deadly Dragons[skyrim.nexusmods.com] (if you don't use it already). It will allow you to modify enemy dragons' health and damage to your liking. I designed my powered-up shouts with the high-level versions of the dragons from Deadly Dragons in mind (I usually play with them set at anywhere from 300-600% health based on how many followers I have with me). Vanilla Skyrim dragons tend to be really weak, so you'll definitely want to amp up their stats if you want some truly epic dragon battles.

As for your load order, just make sure to place this mod after any other dragon mod. The only dragon this mod affects is Odahviing and won't change any other dragons' breath attacks or stats, so you want to make sure the changes to Odahviing get applied and not overwritten by a larger dragon mod.

That should pretty much cover everything. Hope you enjoy it, endorse if you do.

Drem Yol Lok