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Ordinator Tip - Performing, Dancing and Drumbeats

Tags: #Dragonborn1721  #Tips and Tricks Ordinator  #Tips and Tricks Guide 
  • August 3, 2017

    So I don't really have an incredibly humorous or, honestly I don't have any sort of opening statement that I can think of. Anyway, this is just part of my recent attempt to delve into the Speech skill of Ordinator. It's probably one of the two most interesting skills in my eyes with only Restoration topping it (though honestly Speech has so many cool and interesting mechanics behind it that it's hard to say). 

    I will add my normal disclaimer because I don't have the ability to personally play-test it. All of the information provided is from Enai Siaion's mod descriptions, change logs and a few small reddit articles that delve into specifics but there could be errors in my assumptions or maths at any point. 

    What is Perform?

    My assumption is that Pefrom is supposed to be based off of the D&D class skill of the Bard in some manner, there's an unsurprising amount of D&D related content in Enai's mods (because honestly...it's the best source of inspiration hands down) and I would bet a foot or two that Perform is an attempt to recreate the idea of a Bard in some manner. But uh that's boring stuff, so what does it do? Well there are three categories of the Perform skill. The first is Perform which is more of a money-making or Roleplaying based ability that has no direct use in combat. The second is Irresistible Dance which is an ability that allows you to force enemies to dance, stopping them from any action and negatively effect them in several ways (I assume it's either got a short duration or is disabled if you attack but I can't test that at the moment). The final use is the Earthquake Drum line which is a damage and stagger based ability. 

    Performer - Grants the "Perform" power. Once a day, play a song to entertain up to five people within 50 feet and collect a donation from each, based on your Speech skill and the amount of gold they are carrying.

    Serenade - Performing to members of the opposite sex yields twice as much gold and potentially small items.

    Encore - Able to Perform multiple times per day.

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    Irresistible Dance - Can Perform in combat to force the two nearest enemy people within 100 feet to dance spellbound, preventing them from acting and reducing their armor skills by 50 levels. Use again to stop.

    Golden Fiddle - Irresistible Dance now also forces daedra, undead and animals to listen spellbound

    Lord of the Dance - Irresistible Dance can affect up to five enemies.

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    Earthquake Drum - Can Perform in combat to unleash shockwaves. Each drumbeat deals 50 points of damage to nearby enemies within 30 feet. Use again to stop.

    Witching Rhythm - Earthquake Drum deals 50% more damage. Each beat of Earthquake Drum also briefly reduces the magic resistance of affected enemies by 200% for 0.4 seconds.

    War Drummer - Each beat of Earthquake Drum also heals nearby allies by up to 20 points based on their missing Health percentage, and grants them 100% extra attack damage for 0.4 seconds.

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    So, the skills or perk line is fairly varied. It does primarily operate more offensively than you'd think with Earthquake drum being a fairly powerful attack with a lot of debilitating effects. Now, we can gt to the reason that I wanted to post this tip of sorts. I suppose it might be a Guide (will decide and edit by posting time) but I want to look at how viable or insane this can all get.

    Now unfortunetly there aren't many things that I think can boost it because the formula for Perform is simple. Gold = Speech*5 (technically I think it's Speech*5 = Gold Earned  but that's just semantics.) That's just the base, from as early as Level 20 you'll be earning a minimum of 100 gold per person effected + an unknown percentage based off of their pocket gold. What is cool is that this combination works fairly well with Imperious, Stones of Galen and the Dibella Shrine. Now I won't go into much detail here (because my Shrine Blessings Tip goes into more detail), but there's a unique combination of effects you can get by being a Breton with Aurora Standing Stones, taking the Ritual Stone and a few Restoration perks, namely Pilgram and Gods and Mortals

    What it definitely does is allow you to have a 40 or 80 points boost to Speech after praying at the Shrine of Dibella for 300 seconds meaning you can either max out your speech, or at the very least triple it at Level 20 (when you get Performer). What it might do, and what I'm not too sure on is enhance your Speech to 180 if your base Speech is 100. I can't quite remember trying to take a skill beyond 100 through effects in Skyrim recently so I'll have to quickly test that. But if so that would change the base amount of gold from Perform to 900 Gold per person, meaning a baseline of upto 4500 gold without even factoring in the small amount of money that thtey might be carrying.

    Irresistible Dance is relatively simple, it's rather overpowered but there's nothing extreme about it that's as cool as the boosts to Perform. Nothing that I can tell would boost the effects. 

    Earthquake Drum is somewhat more interesting. The damage isn't all that amazing at 75 points but the possibilites behind the other perks are staggering. Being able to reduce the magic resistance of enemis while increaasing allied damage and restoring health creates a fairly insane combination that in my mind works incredibly well with Conjuration (especially a Frost Atronach that is melee focused but does constant magic damage thanks to Frost Cloak), but the overall effectiveness of the skill depends entirely on how often the drum beats. At the very least I know that it's less frequent than two a second, there's no way that Enai (who's mods are generally balanced) to create an ability that boosts itself.

    Closing Notes:

    So Perform has the potential to be somewhat interesting as a Roleplaying tip and Earthquake Drum and Irresistible Dance are most certainly powerful support options but can't really do much in the grand scheme of things because of how they're created. Neither really does percentage based damage, elemental effects or anything that can really be boosted, even if they were based on Speech that would be more interesting from a mathematical point of view (because then you could get some really cool effects with the same stuff that boost Perform) or maybe even a more incremental system towards it. Where at 20 Speech so and so happens, at 30 it gets A as an extra effect, 50 gives you B, and so on. 

    Anyway, I hope this little tip here taught you something relatively interesting, even if it's just how kind of cool Perform can potentially be with Enai's mod list. 

  • Member
    January 27, 2018

    I went through the Speech tree for a while and played with Perform. As time went by, the build I was using didn’t get a lot out of the drum, so I eventually dropped it entirely in favor of the Spectral Drum.

    I got a lot out of combining it with the Become a Bard mod on the nexus. That way I always had a lute on my back for the whole musician feel and could do “official” performances at inns and other places as well as perform whenever I wanted as a streeet musician.

    Speech is probably one of the most interesting of the Ordinator trees. It really makes an Agent or Bard playthrough, where a lot of emphasis is placed on Speech, worth diving into.

  • January 27, 2018

    I went through the Speech tree for a while and played with Perform. As time went by, the build I was using didn’t get a lot out of the drum, so I eventually dropped it entirely in favor of the Spectral Drum.

    I got a lot out of combining it with the Become a Bard mod on the nexus. That way I always had a lute on my back for the whole musician feel and could do “official” performances at inns and other places as well as perform whenever I wanted as a streeet musician.

    Speech is probably one of the most interesting of the Ordinator trees. It really makes an Agent or Bard playthrough, where a lot of emphasis is placed on Speech, worth diving into.

    I'm fairly partial to using it for Shout Oriented builds myself, I did have a Conjuration-Speech build going awhile back that was going to focus on Perform and Drum Perks combined with various Conjuration Effects but just never got around to it. Honestly, I'm not that surprised the Drum Perks weren't that useful, they're cool and all but I can see the limitations of the perks.

    Ah, Become a Bard, yeah that was my go-to when playing with Speech (or was going to be :P), definitely some interesting seeming combinations that could be achieved between the two.