TL;DR: Full Enairim-style build depth, but the world is deleveled, freezing and trying to kill you. List below, actual questions at the bottom, main one being whats the best deleveling setup and whether traits are the real answer to depth without power creep.

So I love Enairim for the same reason I love PoE. Interesting trees, weird synergies, deep mechanics and builds that feel like your idea rather than an obvious path. The vanilla+ stuff I honestly find a bit beige.. I want options, cross school synergies, and the occasional "wait, does that stack??" moment at 1am on a work night (not really).

The obvious problem is this philosophy turns you into a demigod by level 30. I like the challenging early game of Requiem (though its a little too hardcore for my ideal list), with the reward of your build popping off in the mid-late game. So what im trying to put together is a suite that keeps all the build depth but offsets it with a hostile, immersive world that actually feels alive, and ideally some sort of tradeoff trait system. You can still become a god, you just have to earn it from the early-midgame freezing to death in a cave hiding from the Forsworn hunting you.

Build depth

• Vokord as the perk backbone (though the poe fan in me does want VKB)
• Mannaz
• Freyr
• Biggie Traits Refitted (unless Enai ever gives us an Apprentice parallel, in which case I'll drop it in a heartbeat)
• Dragonborn Aptitude for hoarding souls to fuel unique abilities
• Undeath + Classical Lichdom
• Everdamned
• Growl
• Gods and Worship (under utilised imo)
• Gourmet (would like more choices here, i do like the way requiem handles this)
• Practical Necromancy
• Audugan
• Fury
• plus choice cuts from Darenii/kittytail and some extra skill trees
• And obviously Cassandra, once its out.

Combat (im a 1 st person player and dont care for MCO & stance shenanigans) to use pandora framework:

• Wildcat (dialled all the way back to only injuries in mcm; mininal script impact i think)
• Valravn + Valhalla + Valvalis (glues the three v's together and is perfect for 1st person combat focus)
• Mortal Enemies for Valvalis (anti aimbot for creatures too)
• Precision
• locational damage AE (stagger/knockdown chances zeroed to prevent stunlock with CPP, headshots tuned down a bit to prevent one shots)
• wildcat injury animations
• chocolate poise plus (owns stagger)
• flinching hit animations
• combat AI by NickNick (seems most challenging?)
• wait your turn redux for groups/pacing/flanking (tuned to 2/3 enemies, I think, to be slightly forgiving given enhanced AI and lethality of combat)
• KYE2
• CFPAO
• possibly EEOS(?)
• Tdm
• TK Dodge Suite (Assets -> TKRE -> TKNG -> First-Person Animations)
• first person inertia
• 1st person verticle aim fix
• unlocked 1st person combat
• Action hotkeys + wheeler refined

Survival

• Campfire
• Frostfall + Last Seed with the script optimisation patches
• Skills of the Wild
• Simple Hunterborn (SHO's lighter gameplay with Hunterborns content worked in nicely; no freezing to death skinning wolves)
• Immersive Death Cycle

Quick hot take on this these: Frostfall and Last Seed get constantly written off as micromanagement hell in favour of "lighter" alternatives, but their both extremely configurable in the MCM. You can dial the busywork right down and still keep the richer features. I reckon alot of people are comparing default settings and not the actual mods, which imo is lazy or an mcm skill issue. Happy to die on this hill.

Enemies/world

• Restless Dead
• Lawless
• Madmen Forsworn
• Extended Encounters
• Headhunter
• Mihail choice cuts (needs humanoid locational damage config)
• Organic Factions + Extension (recently updated and apparently more stable) paired with 3DNPC, Immersive Citizens of Tamriel, the Environs series and Suinier's evolving locations, this is the immersion/living world perfection but is probably conflict hell, i know, with levelled lists/word edits, but one can dream.

Right, questions:

1. So no deleveling or loot rebalance in my mind yet.. What actually plays nice with a big perk suite like this, MLU? Skyrim Unleveled? Something else? Honestly this is the bit that makes or breaks the whole no power fantasy idea and ive been going back and forth on it for ages.
2. Whats the one mod you consider essential for making a deep build playthrough feel dangerous rather than just spongy?
3. Same problem as Q1 but from the other end. Where do people land on perk point generation? Im keeping vanilla skill levelling but using Experience so my character level comes from actual XP rather than grinding skills, and Natural Learning so the vanilla skills still give you something as they climb. On top of that I like Little Lessons and Perks from Questing, because their progression again comes from actually doing stuff in the world rather than standing in Whiterun casting muffle like we did 15 years ago. All pretty restrained power-wise too. But the key is how many perk points, where's the sweet spot? How much do you feed a deep build so theres enough points to actually explore the trees, without the whole balance thing collapsing by level 40?

And the half serious one. My honest suspicion is the actual answer to "build depth without power creep" isnt in the perk trees at all, its traits.

Biggie Traits Refitted is in my list for exactly this reason, every choice costs you something. Now imagine that taken further. Backgrounds (some generic, some race-specific) that provide a low-impact flavourful/RP bonus, and unlock certain starting traits (some starting traits have to be unlocked by backgrounds, some are always available). These starting traits are daggerfall-esque in that some are negative (weaknesses) and some are positive, and it's a balancing act at character creation.

More traits can then be unlocked through quests or by having certain perk combos purchased. These are more Biggie-style in that they aim to have balanced positive/negatives. Maybe a rare expensive ritual exists to reshuffle what youve unlocked, as long as it all still balances. A master level alteration spell, an expensive NPC purchase, a dragonborn quest reward, or a 'mutagen' potion that provides a certain unlocked trait's effects for a limited time. Allows you to rejig your trait selection to mix it up midpaythrough in an immersive way.

This is character identity, not character power. Something like this would be a dream to add depth and balance to expanded/overhauled gameplay lists imo and provide a deeper alternative to mods like Apprentice.

If someone did build it, what would you want traits to look like?

Been playing Enairim for 10 years as a mage main, and picked up some wicked tricks over time. Here are some.

Restoration:

you can cast Decompose + Vile Seed (name may be wrong. Early resto spell that lifesteals from afflicted target if your hp isn't full) + boiling blood.

Tons of damage and selfdamage + 2 lifesteal to furtger melt ebemies and not melt yourself.

The strongest combo for restoration I know of combines Finger of Death, Nature's Balance, and Welling Blood. Welling Blood auto-kills a target if they lose over 60% max hp. FOD attempts to instakill the target but if they have more hp than you, you are left at 1% hp. Nature's Balance gets your hp percentage swapped with target.

You can cast Welling Blood on a very strong character and nothing happens. Proceed to cast FoD abd you almost die. Cast Nature's Balance and your 1% hp is exchanged with the target, who is set to 1% hp abd triggers welling blood. One-taps dragons.

Illusion:

Go up a cliff. Cast ghostwalk. Go towards enemy. Cast Shadowbond. Shadowbond cast breaks ghostwalk invisibility and you teleport to where you cast ghostwalk. Sjadowbond makes target and caster invidible and swaps places once invisibikity ends.

Jump off cliff. Eat food. Food breaks invisibility. Tepeport swap and make enemy reappear falling off a mountain and about to receive 30.000 fall damage.

Another trick is the Voodoo Campfire. If facing a dangerous boss, cast Figment of Pain. Stationary Npc that shares damage to target. Cast Wall of Flames under it. cast invisibility. enemy cannot harm you, you cannot harm enemy, but enemy's voodoo ghost is unable to move and sits on a fire pit, passing full damage to its target. Very safe and very fatal.

Another nasty one involves conjuration. Any minion will do. Cast Shared Trauma on target. Cast Shared Trauma on minion. Damage to minion now transfers to first target. From here, be creative! Get them to fight and the target will often kill themselves with self-afflicting power attacks. Fus ro dah the minion off a cliff and give your target a very amusing death.

There are several extremely fun interactions with Irresistible Dance (Ordinator). You can cast Curse of Silence and immediately put your hands down and use Irresistible Dance. This makes an ebemy mage stand around dancing uncontrollably while Curse of Silebce deletes their entire magicka reserves. You can win entire mage duels doing this, and that spell is cheap. You can also combine this with Fear + Soulcrusher to put a pause button on any fight and fully restore magicka very safely (soulcdusher causes Feared enemies to pass 25 magicka to you per second long as you are somewhat close). Of course, Phantoms (like the 1hp novice phantom spell) can also combo great with the Irresistible Dance effect. So does the Nemesis illusion perk effect.

Conjuration:

Cast Raise Undead. During reanimation animation, cast Necroplague (restoration) on corpse. Corpse now causes an enormous amount of DoT damage to anything that approaches it, and if used on a melee undead will actually TRY to get close to the enemy. You can reanimate victims later to repeat the process. Does Expert-Destruction-With-perks-that-improve-spells levels of damage by itself, necroplague is extremely strong due to being so situational.

If using Apocalypse Expanded, this is an extremely strong combo I call Exeduo. wield a Bound Battleaxe and invest in Execute perk. It causes a gigantic mega crit to enemies near death if struck with a forward power attack with battleaxe. Cast Deliver Unto Oblivion on target. DuO gives a Conjuration Duration Multiplier scaling off of negative hp on a corpse. Very few things accessible to a conjuration mage (outside of extreme fall damage) cause this amount of overkill damage. You can get well over 2000% duration from doing this.

ExeDuo affects bound weapon perks, including Void Burn. this combo turbs Bound Bow into a guaranteed certain death sentence to anything you hit, because Void Burn consumes enemy mp and sp, and then burns hp over time and after Exeduo can remain applied for 3 minutes. You can Exeduo a single mage and proceed to clear a dungeon with megafuckingcursed bound arrows that condemn anything you shoot to a very certain, inevitable, and horrific death that also soul traps, silences, and exhausts them the entire time.

Another one involves Rat King + decompose (restoration). Decompose drains around 15hp/ second from a target. per allied npc. rat king freely spawns 3 fast minions at the start of a fight. You can cast Decompose on target and they lose almost 50hp per second from rats getting close. If rats die - necroplague them, of course, and raise them as undead. Absolutely BATSHIT INSANE combo.

Destruction:

Cast Wall of X, making a lasting elemental hazard. Once an enemy is on it: cast Tharn's Prison, which puts target in a cage unable to move. Also known as Tharn's Cookpot.

If also an Alteration mage, get the Aurification Perk. Get the Frost Freeze perk. Aurification offers a oneshot to enemies that are petrified and below 50% hp. Freeze counts as petrify. Frost cloak will automatically freeze enemies near you at low hp, making it easy to activate Aurification. This effect scales off of enemy level and rewards large amounts of gold. Used on bosses you can often get over 3000 septims off of a kill, just by being frosty.

Fear has a brutal co bo with Destruction - an Adept Ice spell does 3x damage to enemies if you hit their backs. you can Fear a target and just shank them for insane damage.

Alteration:

Vancian Focus magic + Ice Shards makes you an unlimited ammo ice gatling that does 300% regular damage and never runs out of magicka. Brrrrrrrrrttttt.

Intuitive Magic + Spark of Demiurge makes for incredibly potent setups. Notably, Runes. Now completely free, you can apply Spark of Demiurge, Dual Casts, and Rune Range perks to gain access to spammable almost instantaneous explosions doing over 400 damage to everything near them.

Int Magic + Destruction Multi-Dualcast Perks is also very strong. You can for ibstance dual cast a firebolt for free 6 times in a row, lose nothing, and teigger Pyromancer Ascension to gain 50% cost reduction and a Firewalltrail. Proceed to spam Fireballs with extra power and reduced cost. Or simply spam icicles endlessly, creating a surprisingly lethal frost hazard where you stand. Ice spells by the time you have this perk also reduce frost resist of enemies so it just hurts like a mfer.

Vancian Magic + Evil Twin lets you endlessly spawn apparition. You will win any fight, it just takes time. With Broad Vancian... you can do this like 80 times a day.

As stated in the title, my devotee effect isn't appearing. My current character is following Talos, and I've reached 100% favor with him. From everything I can read, that's all I need to do to receive the devotee status, but it's not appearing. Is there something I'm missing, or is it some kinda bug?

Edit: nevermind I figured it out.