User:Olaus/Crafting with Haunting Gift

The Necromantic Grimoire creation added an interesting new spell called Conjure Haunting Ghost. When the ghost is killed by an enemy, they are afflicted with a status effect (not sure if their side of the effect has a name) which siphons 10 levels of every skill from them and confers them to you for one minute as the Haunting Gift buff. These skill buffs can be used to raise your effective crafting skill ceiling.

Some notes on how the spell works:

• The Haunting Spirit will attack enemies with a dagger and the frostbite spell. It's fairly weak but might defeat the weakest enemies.
• When the Haunting Spirit is killed, the screen shakes which can help you identify when the effect starts. The affected foe will have a purple glow.
• The effect is between you and an enemy and will be gone if the enemy is killed or if you leave the area.
• An enemy or neutral party must kill the Haunting Spirit. If a follower is ordered to do it the effect will not trigger.
• Two Haunting Spirits can be conjured together with the Twin Souls perk.
• The effect can stack if multiple foes kill separate Haunting Spirits.
• A single enemy can only provide a single instance of the Haunting Gift effect.
• The effect can follow you across zones, but seems unreliable when doing so. In one test the skill bonus disappeared before the effect expired on the Active Effects list.

Note: The results below were done using the unofficial patch. The same process can be followed on the unpatched game, but the final potion and enchantment values will be different.

Base Game vs. Unofficial Patch

In addition to fixing the infamous bug where the Fortify Restoration effect applied a bonus to crafting, the unofficial patch modifies the formula for enchantment potency. This causes this process to have different results with or without the patch.

In the unpatched game, using only three instances of Haunting Gift while enchanting (use while brewing doesn't matter) will result in runaway growth of your abilities, allowing arbitrarily high enchanting powers without exploiting the Fortify Restoration bug. Three instances can be cumbersome but definitely achievable. Two instances when enchanting and three when brewing also works. Your ultimate enchantment/potion/smithing power will be limited only by your patience and the point where overflow errors break the game.

With the unofficial patch on the other hand, it would take twelve instances of Haunting Gift (for both enchanting and brewing) to achieve unlimited growth. At first glance, I thought this would almost certainly be infeasible. Not only would it require you to arrange for twelve separate foes to all defeat Haunting Spirits, but you'd need to average doing this faster than once every 5 seconds. However I've now managed to stack 12 instances of the effect while enchanting at Dead Men's Respite. I've not yet found a location as good for brewing, so unlimited growth at this point appears to be just out of reach. Assuming 12 & 12 cannot be done, there will be some asymptotic ceiling that your potions and enchantments can reach, depending on exactly how many instances of Haunting Gift you're able to manage.

Preparation

Since the effect only lasts 60 seconds and crafting stations cannot be used in combat, utilizing this bonus can be quite tricky, and is cumbersome even in a controlled setting. I don't recommend attempting it until you have every other possible crafting bonus available to you and several additional supporting abilities, including:

• Alchemy 100
• Alchemy perks:
  • Alchemist 5
  • Physician
  • Benefactor
• Enchanting 100
• Enchanting perks:
  • Enchanter 5
  • Insightful Enchanter
  • Extra Effect
• Smithing 100
• Applicable smithing perks for any equipment you wish to temper
• Conjuration 100
• Twin Souls perk
• A high sneak level and sneak perks are helpful, but a particular level isn't required
• Black Book: The Sallow Regent
• All of Ahzidal's equipment
• Severin Manor
• Raven Rock Mine Key
• Notched Pickaxe (if using the Unofficial Patch which fixes it)
• Sinderion's Serendipity effect
• Spells:
  • Conjure Ash Guardian
  • Conjure Haunting Spirit
  • Invisibility
• Any low damage bow or ranged spell
• The Slow Time shout (the more words the better)
• Enchantments (minimum):
  • Fortify Alchemy
  • Fortify Smithing
• The best Fortify Alchemy gear you have so far
• A stock of unenchanted clothing to enchant, at least a dozen each:
  • Rings
  • Necklaces
  • Gloves or gauntlets (lower weight is more convenient)
  • Hats or helmets (lower weight is more convenient)
• A stock of grand or black soul gems with grand souls
• A stock of these common alchemy ingredients:
  • Blisterwort & Glowing Mushrooms (or other Fortify Smithing ingredients)
  • Blue Butterfly Wing & Snowberries (or other Fortify Enchanting ingredients)
  • River Betty or other Fortify Alteration ingredients
• As many of these Rare Curios ingredients as you can get:
  • Dreugh Wax
  • Gold Kanet
  • Stoneflower Petals
• Fortify Conjuration gear (ideally to 0 magicka cost)
• Enpowered Necromancy gear
• Ring of the Wind may help move to crafting stations faster

The Rare Curios ingredients are hard to find. Speak to the caravan merchants every single time you pass them and always buy out their stock of at least these ingredients, if not all of them. You might even consider leaving the quests that provide markers for them unfinished for a time to help you track their location. Keep them someplace safe, eventually bringing them to Severin Manor on Solstheim.

Because the Black Book: The Sallow Regent is essential to top level crafting and can only be read on Solstheim, that is by far the most convenient place to do the crafting initially. You'll be switching between Seeker Of abilities frequently. As you progress you will likely have to go to Skyrim to find dungeons more suitable to using the Haunting Gift effect, traveling to Solstheim to switch abilities between each step in the process.

General Crafting Loop Notes

Each loop consists of a brewing step and an enchanting step. It's slightly better to brew first, but it doesn't matter much. In some circumstances, brewing first may result in you having to enchant one fewer gear sets, while still brewing the same number of potions.

Additionally, you'll go through the fewest loops if you start with all extra components from the beginning: The Sallow Regent, Ahzidal's gear, Rare Curios ingredients, and multiple-instanced Haunting Gift. However if you haven't done this before, you might need to take it one step at a time to start learning the whole process. The guide below is written by introducing one major element at a time, but combine them all at once if you're comfortable with it. You might also decide you're satisfied with the power well below the theoretical limit.

Initial Brewing/Enchanting Loop

You can use your alchemy skills to create Forify Enchanting potions and your enchanting skills to create Fortify Alchemy gear (hat, gloves, ring, and necklace). The two skills form a positive feedback loop that eventually approach an asymptotic ceiling.

Survival mode note: If you're playing on Survival Mode, make sure you're rested. If you are fatigued or worse, it negatively effects you enchanting ability. If you have not yet cleansed the All-Maker stones on Solstheim, sleeping there will be very annoying because of the chance of a random warp to one of the stones. You can quick save before sleeping or sleep in Windhelm.

We'll be repeating this loop until you hit that ceiling:

1. Read The Sallow Regent and select Seeker of Shadows.
2. Equip your best Fortify Alchemy gear.
3. Quick Save
4. Brew a Fortify Enchanting potion (don't use the Rare Curios ingredients yet).
5. Read The Sallow Regent and select Seeker of Sorcery.
6. Equip four pieces of Ahzidal's equipment to get the Ahzidal's Genius buff (should raise you enchanting level to 110).
7. Get a set of enchantable clothing (hat, gloves, ring, necklace) and filled soul gems (grand).
8. Quick Save
9. Take a Fortify Alteration potion (optional)
10. Use the Slow Time shout (as many words as you have)
11. Take a Fortify Enchanting potion
12. Enchant gear with Fortify Alchemy (you should be able to get at least two pieces per potion, even when renaming).

Odds are you'll often notice you forgot something right when you enter the crafting station, so quick saving is important. Repeat this loop until you find that the strength of the potions and enchantments aren't going up any more. If you have the unofficial patch installed, you should top out at +44% alchemy gear after a few loops.

If you have the Extra Effect perk, you might also add Fortify Smithing to the same equipment, although this only matters for the last round. The second effect on the hat doesn't matter yet, but Fortify Conjuration will be helpful later when conjuring the Haunted Spirits enters the picture.

You might want to take your second-tier alchemy gear back to Skyrim for use with brewing money-making potions or any other functional potions.

Aside: Extending Enchanting Time with Slow Time Shout

Using the Slow Time shout will extend the effective duration of the 30 second Fortify Enchanting potions. A three word shout is supposed to slow time to 10% of normal speed, which theoretically would extend the duration to 300 seconds (five minutes). However on testing, it is unfortunately much less effective than this. The best case scenario would be a three word shout using a Fortify Alteration potion to extend the effect duration. This yields only 47 seconds of time at the enchanting table with the potion in effect. A fairly weak Fortify Alteration potion is sufficient to extend the slowed time until the potion runs out, there's no need to use high power Fortify Alchemy gear to make boosted Fortify Alteration potions. I'm not sure what the details of the game mechanics are such that you only get ~17-19 extra seconds, but that's how it is. You should be able to do at least 3 enchantments in this time if all three have two effects and are renamed. If you enchant only a single effect and don't bother renaming, you might get many more pieces enchanted.

Second Stage: Rare Curios Potions

Rare Curios includes two ingredients with a 2x multiplier on the Fortify Enchanting potency (Dreugh Wax and Stoneflower Petals) and two ingredients with a 1.25x multiplier on the Fortify Smithing enchantment (Dreugh Wax, again, and Gold Kanet). Using two these ingredients together does not stack the multiplier, so brew them with one ordinary ingredient to conserve them. If you don't mind save scumming, the ingredients are rare enough that you might want to reroll for Sinderion's Serendipity to kick in, giving you a free second potion. Use the Dreugh Wax last since it's dual-purpose.

With these boosted potions, you should see a much greater effect. Repeat the loops until you max out again. You should now reach +61% alchemy gear.

Third Stage: Haunting Gift (Single Instance)

For just a single instance of the Haunting Gift effect, this can fortunately be done reliably in a controlled setting. Using the Ash Guardian spell without heart stones, you can conjure up a single enemy anywhere at any time. Haunting Gift works on it and boosts all skill levels. However you probably won't want to use this in any of your player homes because the resulting battle between the Ash Guardian and the Haunting Spirit will send any placeables in the home flying, leaving it a mess that will never be cleaned. So it's time to actually use those crafting stations in a dungeon for once!

Use of The Sallow Regent still applies, so it's best to find a suitable location close by on Solstheim. Fortunately Raven Rock Mine has a good location for both Alchemy and Enchanting. Friendly NPCs will be in the entrance of the mine after completing the quest, but they won't venture deeper into the crypt where the alchemy lab and enchanting table are, so they won't be disturbed by the fight.

There's a hallway between the alchemy lab and enchanting table where I like to stage the fight. You may want to hotkey the Invisibility spell. After making all the same preparations from the loop above, do the following:

1. Quick Save
2. Sneak.
3. Conjure the Haunting Spirit at maximum distance (it will run toward you).
4. As quickly as possible after, conjure the Ash Guardian between you and the Haunting Spirit (doing this in the other order will also usually work).
5. Sneak away from the fight toward the crafting station. It may help to cast Invisibility, but this usually isn't necessary. The enemy awareness indication eye should only ever get slightly open.
6. Crouch beside the crafting station and wait for both the following to occur: you become hidden again, and the screen shakes indicating the Haunting Spirit has been killed.
7. Verify the Haunting Gift effect has been added by checking either your skill screen or active effects.
8. Slow Time shout.
9. If enchanting, take the Fortify Enchanting potion.
10. Use the crafting station.

As before, when using Rare Curios ingredients, you might consider rerolling to get bonus potions.

The Ash Guardian will still be there when you're ready to do the next crafting session, but for some reason it seems to become docile after the first fight. You could kill it and conjure a new one, or alternatively aggro it with a bow shot or something as you summon in the next Haunting Spirit. I've been using the Spectral Arrow spell for this, but that requires the Cutting Room Floor mod to make available. Anything that doesn't cause you to be fully detected should be fine.

You should have to do this nine times: three loops of one brewing session and two enchanting sessions (assuming you don't get all 4 gear pieces made in 30 seconds). On the third loop you should max out at +68% enchanting gear (again, using the unofficial patch).

Smithing

First the easy case: armor. Since the effective damage resist of armor is capped off at an armor value of 567, there's no need for ever increasing smithing quality levels once you reach this threshhold. While the smithing gear you create from this loop will help with armor tempering, including the Haunting Gift extension of that loop, you should spare yourself the trouble of using Haunting Gift for that tempering itself, and also save on using a Dreugh Wax or Gold Kanet and stick with the basic Fortify Smithing potion recipe.

For weapons however, you can always use more damage. First you need to create smithing body armor or clothing using the same enchanting process detailed above. Hopefully you already got your smithing ring, necklace, and gloves using Extra Effect. You also need to use the Haunting Gift process along with Gold Kanet or Dreugh Wax to make a top level Fortify Smithing potion (317%).

You'll probably find that the smithing potions you can now create are so overpowered that it isn't worth bothering using Haunting Gift for this step. But if you're interested in trying it with a single instance, I wrote out the steps below.

A suitable grindstone location is needed. There is a grindstone in Raven Rock Mine, but it's at the entrance where NPCs gather. I've successfully used the grindstone closeby at Brodir Grove. I'd prefer an indoor location, but I'm not aware of a good option near Raven Rock. Be sure to clear out any hostile foes in the area first, including whatever might spawn from random World Interactions nearby.

Then for the best possible smithing quality, do the following steps:

1. Read The Sallow Regent and select Seeker of Might.
2. Travel to your selected grindstone location (e.g. Brodir Grove).
3. Equip your four Fortify Smithing gear pieces.
4. Conjure the Haunting Spirit and Ash Guardian a reasonable distance away from the grindstone.
5. Sneak away (invisibility might be needed if you are not indoors).
6. Equip the Notched Pickaxe (unofficial patch only).
7. Use the Slow Time shout.
8. Take the Fortify Smithing potion.
9. Temper your weapons.
10. After exiting the grindstone, check if you still have a few seconds left on your potion and on Haunting Gift to verify that all the weapons were maximally tempered.

I recommend bringing 20-30 weapons to temper each time you do this, since you're going to so much trouble with the rare potion ingredients and the Haunting Spirit. It's easier to go through the menu if you only have one of each weapon to be tempered, although it is possible while slightly clumsier to temper stacks of weapons. You can check the quality level using the value of unenchanted weapons. Before utilizing multiple-instance Haunting Gift crafting, I maxed out at smithing at a quality level 102 with 18x the base value.

Two Instances and Beyond

The Haunting Gift effect stacks if you have multiple opponents landing the finishing blows on your Haunting Spirits. With the Twin Souls perk, you could summon two and get the effect twice. You can then summon two more and get the effect again, limited only by the number of enemies and how fast you can get the Haunting Spirits killed before the 60 second timer on the first one expires.

Using the Empower Necromancy enchantment also from Necromantic Grimoire, you can summon three Haunting Spirits at once. This isn't necessarily a good idea however; the goal is for enemies to kill the spirits as fast as possible. Multiple targets might improve that if you have enough enemies with sufficient attack power, but smaller or weaker groups might instead be slowed down by splitting their forces.

A suitable location would require a crafting station with a naturally spawning enemy a reasonable distance away. Too far and you might not reach the crafting station in time, too close and you might not escape the battle and be able to use the station. The enemy also needs to be strong enough to reliably defeat the Haunting Ghost. The second enemy could potentially be an Ash Guardian once again, but it would then be hostile to the other foe, and they need to both stay alive.

The next hurdle is ensuring each enemy kills one haunting ghost, rather than both killed by the same enemy. In practice there is little you can do to control this; just conjure your spirits within the enemy group and hope for the best.

You might be thinking you could lure enemies from far away areas together, gathering them in a chosen arena location, but I've had poor luck with this strategy. Enemies that lose sight of you tend to quickly return to their normal posts. Furthermore, you need to be hidden to use the crafting station, and enemies lured from distant areas tend not to de-aggro in a timely manner, which ruins the crafting session.

I've had success with the following areas:

Alchemy:

• Tolvald's Cave. 4 instances is easy, but my record is now 8 concurrent instances (start in back room, then work back toward the trap room).
• Forsaken Crypt. I had such high hopes for this location, it would be thematically fitting. There's a good number of draugr in the area, but many would need to be lured to the boss room. This works poorly, they tend to run away over time. They're surprisingly weak against the Haunting Spirits as well.

Enchanting:

• Darkwater Pass. Somewhat messy but managed a couple 4 instance enchants.
• High Gate Ruins. Requires luring the draugr away from the enchanter, but perhaps easier to control than Darkwater Pass.
• Dead Men's Respite. This could well be the ideal location. See below.

Enchanting in Dead Men's Respite

From my exploration thus far, this appears to be the best location to do enchanting. Something to be aware of first: there are two possible ways to get stuck in this dungeon, with no way out other than console commands or reloading a prior save. If you have completed the Bard's College quest here, then King Olaf is replaced with a generic Draugr Death Overlord which does not carry the key to unlock the exit. If you aren't carrying the key from before or enough lockpicks to open a master lock, you might get stuck. The second way is if you enter the boss room, triggering the gate to close behind you, then do a second loop through the dungeon without killing the Draugr Death Overlord. The now closed gate blocks you from proceeding, and you can't backtrack because of the high drop into the water.

The arcane enchanter is near the end of the dungeon, down a long hallway from the boss room. Inside the boss room, a gate will close behind you as you enter. Normally you are intended to fight the draugr in this room a couple at a time, with more waking up each time you make a kill. However they can all be woken at once if you deal non-lethal damage to the seated draugr. The final Draugr Death Overlord must be killed to reopen the entry gate. I'm not entirely sure what the conditions are to get it to wake from its coffin, but it eventually got up after I woke all the other draugr and had them spar against Haunting Spirits for a bit. At this point you have a room full of a dozen or so enemies, several of them able to conjure frost atronachs.

You'll want fortify conjuration gear for this step, because you'll be spamming Conjure Haunting Spirit a lot. Get hidden and conjure the spirits amidst the draugr. To the extent you can, focus casting them near enemies that haven't killed any yet (no purple glow). Make your way toward the gate (it should be open after killing the Draugr Death Overlord, the only enemy you should have killed). Keep conjuring, timing it with a new spirit coming in each time one is killed. Start opening your stats screen on each kill to check how many instances you have. When you've gotten as high as you think you can manage (I did 12 once, but that may not be consistently repeatable), make sure two or three freshly conjured spirits are in the room and quickly run out to the arcane enchanter. I was able to get to the enchanter (hidden and able to use it) with 12 active instances. Combined with Ahzidal's Genuis, this yields an effective enchanting level of 230.

To max out the crafting loop with my current record of 8 instances for brewing and 12 for enchanting, you'd need to pull this off a whopping 50 times, which is quite a bit more than lower level versions of this technique before the introduction of multiply instanced Haunting Gift. And each of those loops may require setting up to enchant twice, depending on how many enchantments you can get done within the duration of the potion and before some of your Haunting Gifts wear off. Getting that many iterations of the highest possible instance count would be a bit maddening. The more instances you stack, the shorter the time window to use it is expected to be. A relatively sane strategy might be to set a threshhold somewhere lower than the maximum, e.g. enchant whenever you are still above 8 instances. As long as the new Fortify Alchemy gear is stronger than the last, that's progress. However if you did continue looping until you hit an absolute ceiling, any loop with less than the highest possible instances would increase the total number of loops you need to do, meaning more annoying to procure Rare Curios ingredients consumed.

I now estimate that +1379% enchanting potions and +800% fortify alchemy/smithing gear is possible, perhaps more. It'll be a slow process to do legitimately, but I plan to work on it bit by bit and see how high I can go.

New Verified Creations

I'm not sure if the Verified Creations that started being added in December 2023 will ever be as official as the Creation Club, given that they disable achievements and seem to be held to looser quality standards. However they are a little bit more official than other mods, I suppose. What items relevant to crafting have been added by them?

The Legendary Dungeons: Dwarven Delves creation, specifically in the Stone Garden dungeon included a chest piece and boots enchanted with Fortify Alchemy +15% (also an arm piece, but that's irrelevant). Those slots normally cannot receive a Fortify Alchemy enchantment. There's existing precedent in the base game of unique apparel having enchantments on slots you cannot normally enchant them on yourself, and 15% is middle-of-the-road in terms of the strength of this enchantment, compared to the other pre-enchanted gear you can find. So in that sense, these seem to be a balanced addition. However considering how brokenly powerful the crafting loop already is, even when its bugs are patched, any mod that adds even a very minor additional capability to it risks having a very unbalanced effect, even if the change in and of itself seems benign. Anyway, something to consider for anyone looking at verified creations. Overall I felt this one was on par with the quality of the Creation Club, not at all disappointing the way a few other Verified Creations are, IMO.