The Monk Strategy Guide
This guide gives general hints and tips for playing a monk in Morrowind. With a monk, I mean a hero that relies almost entirely on unarmored and hand-to-hand skill for protection and combat.
Morrowind is a fantastic game for role-playing, with a great choice on how to play your character and how to solve quests. Unfortunately, both the hand-to-hand and unarmored skill are not balanced well with the rest of the game and unarmored even suffers from a terrible bug! (that has never been fixed). I try to remedy these problems with this guide in two ways, first of all, I provide a plugin (the monk plugin) that fixes some unbalanced settings, and secondly I give strategies to make both skills work better. Note that you won't create the best hero when using no armor or weapons, you can create a fun hero though, where you need to work on your strategy and tactics.
See my main page for the mage strategy guide and plugins.
Enjoy!
Aragon [mail]
Creating the character
So you decide to be an unarmored warrior! Any choice of race will do, but here are some points to remember:
- Argonian: starts with a high agility and unarmored +5.
- Breton: lame fighter but can compensate with a high magicka and a strong shield ability.
- Imperial: hand to hand +5, and a fatigue damaging ability (not so useful though).
- Khajiit: hand to hand +5 and very agile.
- Wood elf: high agility.
As we will see later, you surely need take luck as favourite skill, and another good candidate would be agility (to help you evade attacks). For your major skills you obviously take hand-to-hand and unarmored. As we will discuss, restoration should be major too. Furthermore, it is a good plan to put conjuration, marksmanship, and sneak in your minor or major slots.
Hand-To-Hand
The hand-to-hand skill determines how well you can fight with your bare hands. You can activate hand-to-hand combat with the 0-key. When fighting with your bare hands, you damage the fatigue of your opponent - meaning that the opponent will get worse in combat and casting spells during your fight. When the fatigue drops to zero, the opponent is knocked-out, and hand-to-hand will do health damage at that point.
The main problem with the hand-to-hand skill, is that it does too little health-damage. Later in the game, you need a lot of hits before an opponent is killed, which is not much fun. Many people use hand-to-hand for fatigue damage, but switch a blade to finish the opponent. My monk plugin fixes this problem and raises the amount of health damage done by h2h -- bringing back the fun for you!
When starting the game with a fresh hero, h2h seems a meagre skill and hardly effective. However, it raises very quickly and it is very fast. Many times, one can prevent a sorcerer from casting spells by hitting fast enough and by using just the right "rythm". Once h2h is around 70, it becomes a extremely effective. It has been argued that h2h is not always good against many opponents at once (like in bloodmoon), but I think it gives you great strategy -- you can beat one opponent knock-out, continue with another, and when a knocked-out opponent stands up, you knock him out again. You do need a higher skill though for these kind of tricks though.
My advice when starting is to fight with as many "weak" opponents as possible: rats, crabs, and birds. These give great experience and you will level very quickly. Don't be afraid to get hit, this raises you unarmored skill too. Use restore health spells, and you gain experience in restoration too!
Another thing to remember is that Morrowind is not well balanced with regard to fatigue scores. This means that rats and racers are failry though monster with regard to fatigue scores (400), while humans tend to have much lower fatigues (180). For h2h, this means that it can be harder to take out a rat, than an ordinator (well, almost :-).
Technical
You can skip this section if you don't like numbers. Here are the formulas used by morrowind to calculate h2h fatigue and health damage:
fatigue-damage = hand-to-hand * fHandToHandMult
health-damage = hand-to-hand * fHandToHandMult * fHandToHandHealthPer * fCombatKODamageMult
The constants are defined by default as:
fHandToHandMult
= between fMinHandToHandMult and fMaxHandToHandMult
fMaxHandToHandMult = 0.5
fHandToHandHealthPer = 0.1
fCombatKODamageMult = 1.5
Some little calculation shows that the health-damage is indeed really low, even for higher h2h skill values. Therefore the monk mod increases the fHandToHandHealthPer constant to 0.4. It is hard to believe, but Bethesda somehow forgot to take your strenght or agilty into account when calculating the damage :-(
Unarmored
The unarmored skill does not determine how well you can avoid blows, but how well you can absorb them -- it therefore functions like an armor and gives you a higher armor rating (AR). Note that this rating is only applied to body parts that are not covered with other armor.
There is a terrible bug in Morrowind (and never fixed) that causes unarmored not to work when not wearing any armor at all! Read that again: when not wearing any armor, the armor rating from the unarmored skill is not used by the game engine, and you have no protection at all.
Ok, so to use unarmored, you need to wear at least one piece of armor. For example, you could wear a helmet or gauntlets. It is better to avoid wearing boots, as they give a sneak penalty. I personally like to use the "bound gauntlets" spell. This gives me some armor (and thus unarmored works) and I get the cool bonusses from bound gauntlets: +10 for hand-to-hand, and +10 for agility! So, take conjuration as a minor (or major) skill when creating your unarmored hero.
Furthermore, the default armor rating for unarmored is rather low in Morrowind (AR 65 at skill level 100), and the monk mod slightly increases this (to AR 90 at skill 100). However, the armor rating increases exponentially with the skill, which means that for each extra point to your skill, you get more and more armor rating! So, once you get a higher-level hero that can take out golden saints (level >15), you should create constant enchantments that increase your skill level for unarmored. For example, using an exquisite ring or amulet, you can create (at least) an unarmored +20 constant enchantment. (Note: you should have a "fortify skill" spell to make these enchantments -- these spells are available in the Tribunal expansion). Now, if you can get the unarmored skill to 150, you will have an AR of 200! (with weight zero :-). I won't give too many details, but with some common sense and strategy, you can surely survive Morrowind with the unarmored skill.
Technical
Skip this section if you don't like math. The armor rating is calculated by taking the weighted sum of the armor rating of all body parts. The armor coverage is divided as:
Torso
(Cuirass) 30%
Legs (Greaves) 10%
Feet
(Boots)
10%
Head (Helmet) 10%
Hand (Gauntlet)
5% (left and right)
Shoulder (Pauldron) 10% (left and right)
Misc. (Shield)
10%
Don't believe the manual that you got with the game -- the body has a 30% coverage. The normal armor rating is calculated as:
armor-rating = basic-armor-rating * ( armor-skill / 30 )
For example, glass armor has a basic armor rating of 50, so, with full glass coverage with a skill of 100, you get AR 166 (= 100% * 50*(100/30)). For unarmored though, we have the following formula:
armor-rating = unarmored-skill * unarmored-skill * fUnarmoredBase1 * fUnarmoredBase2
Where the constants are defined by default as:
fUnarmoredBase1 = 0.1
fUnarmoredBase2 = 0.065
Ok, so this means that with a skill of 100, we have an armor rating of 65 (=100*100*0.1*0.065) (If unarmored would be free of bugs of course). The monk mod increases fUnarmoredBase2 to 0.09 to increase the armor rating to 90 in that case.
Evasion
The unarmored hero has a great advantage to other heroes -- he has virtually no equipment and is not encumbered. This means that you are fast and can jump much higher. I try to be as light as possible. For example, using conjuration, I tend to use a bound bow instead of carying a bow with me (this also gives a +10 marksman bonus!). When your weight is low (say 60), you will noticeably see the difference in running speed and jumps. Use this to your advantage when fighting. Later in the game, you could make a jump ring that gives a +10 jump bonus. When being light, you can jump real high and use this to your advantage when fighting -- jump over opponents to gain time to cast a restoration spell, jump towards unsuspecting opponents etc.
Restoration is a good skill to have too. In the beginning you will get some beatings and you need restoration to stay alive. I like to create spells like Ki power: restore health 5 pts for 20 seconds. Cast it just before a fight, and you can effectively absorb 100 points of damage over 20 seconds. Finally, the hero needs marksmanship and sneak. With a (bound) bow, you can dish out damage from a distance, and with sneak, you can either avoid fighting in the first place, or deal critical damage with your first blow.
This brings me to avoiding hits in the first place. The chance to get hit by an opponent is:
hit-chance = opponent-combat-skill - (agility / 4) - (luck / 8)
For example, the chance to get hit by a blighted rat (combat skill 60), when you have an agility of 80 and luck of 48, is 34% (= 60 - (80/4) - (48/8)). So, it really pays to increase your agility and luck. A powerful item to increase you agility is the legendary ring of the wind (agility +30). (You should either find it in a quest for the imperial cult, or you can collect it yourself from the Nammu cave, northeast of Tel Aruhn.)
Another option to evade attacks is to use sanctuary spells. However, too much evasion in the beginning in the game is not so good, since you won't train your unarmored skill. I recommend getting hit a lot and increasing your unarmored skill while gaining levels and increasing agility and luck. Later in the game, you could resort to sanctuary to beat stronger monsters (although I could always get away without it).
Plugins
Here are some useful plugins for unarmored heroes:
- Monk, by Aragon. I consider this mod essential for using hand to hand combat and unarmored. It contains minimal adjustments to make both skills more fun. It increases health damage done by h2h, it increases the armor rating of unarmored somewhat, and it changes one of the bonusses on bound gauntlets from +10 agility to +10 unarmored.
- Dodge, by Aragon. Makes unarmored a much more powerful skill by adding a sanctuary bonus. I personally don't use this mod and can get along with just the "Monk" mod, but it may interest you anyway.
- Wizard Clothes, by Aragon. Adds some robes and clothes to the fine clothier Milie Hastien in Balmora. The robes and belts have higher enchantment values than normal clothes. Great for unarmored heroes, but I would consider it cheating when using this mod in combination with normal armor.
See my main page for more plugins.
Credits
The formulas for armor rating can be found on the elder scroll forums. (The other formulas are derived by me).
Last update: 31 may 2004.