Kyneticist makes use of MCO to allow you to play a true 'blaster' mage, no longer needing to rely on other weapons to see you through lengthy combat, and a new dynamic casting experience. It gives you the ability to attack with most of the vanilla destruction/offensive spells without having to pause combat to swap what's equipped. Through using a Kynetic Focus, you can wield Fire, Ice, Shock or Sun magic to obliterate your enemies.







I wanted to create something that allowed me to play somewhat like a Kineticist class in Pathfinder (hence the name), a single-element dedicated 'blast cannon' mage. Thinking it already fit well with Skyrim's quite direct form of destruction magic, I decided to go with an MCO moveset that allows us to deliver (most of) the range of vanilla destruction spells for an element without having to interrupt the flow of combat. Using MCO also creates movement-lock during attacks, which adds a new defensive consideration in the way you approach combat (no more back-peddling/kiting). The result is faster-paced mage gameplay with greater damage capability from earlier levels alongside heightened vulnerability - and hopefully more fun, or at least a way of having fun that wasn't there before.

I want to say early - I'm not an incredible animator. I can't do the flashy stuff that you'll find in many of the MCO movesets about. But because of that I've kept the animations quite simple and grounded, and I feel that's to the mod's benefit as it's very vanilla-spell focused and puts more emphasis on the alternate gameplay style. That said, if anyone is looking at this thinking they can create replacement animations worthy of Dr Strange then by all means go ahead.

How it works

Once you learn any of the Apprentice-level vanilla direct damage spells (Lightning Bolt, Firebolt, Ice Spike, Sun Fire), then at a Forge you will be able to construct a Kynetic Focus for that element. The game views this as a two-handed weapon, but once equipped it will replace your regular attacks with spells for that element. If you don't want to wait to find/buy a spell, then use the console or AddItemMenu to give yourself a Focus straight away.

Initially you will be able to cast simple quick-darts of elemental energy as a normal attack and your Apprentice-level spell as a power attack. You will also have a special short-range power-bash spell appropriate for that element. As you learn new vanilla attack spells you will automatically unlock the ability to use them as part of your MCO moveset (see below for what and how).

As well as the three elemental destruction archetypes, there is also a Sun Focus utilising the undead-damaging spells from Dawnguard as well as some of the vanilla Turn/Bane of Undead spells. 

Spells and how to cast them

Fire a quick-combo of elemental darts at no magicka cost, with the final attack launching a three-dart barrage. These darts have a base damage of 4, increasing by 1 with every ten points in Destruction/Restoration, and they will also scale further with appropriate perks in the magic tree. 
Early game, these darts have comparable damage to the Novice concentration spells. Later, with scaling and perk investment, they're comparable to a high quality dagger that can hit at range. Effectively they serve as a consistent source of damage output to the Kynetic Mage even when out of magicka, but they can't match the single strike weapon damage available to a warrior or rogue - you're still a mage and after all, that's what the proper spells are for.

Weapon Art : Empowered Elements
Enter an empowered state which adds a stagger effect to your quick-darts, but also adds a 10 magicka cost to cast them. Useful for crowd control, but risks draining magicka especially at early levels. Also allows the casting of the more damaging Expert and Master spells. Can be dispelled by activating Weapon Art again, or dispels itself after 30 seconds.

Block Bash : Staggering Quick Dart
Will fire a single quick dart causing stagger for 10 magicka.

Block Power Bash : Elemental Blast
Casts a special short-range spell aimed at hindering your enemy. Shock Blast briefly paralyses. Fire Blast damages and staggers them. Ice Blast briefly freezes them (like the Ice Form shout). Sun Blast has a low-level Turn Undead Effect. These cost 100 magicka to cast, expect for the Sun Blast which costs 50 (as it is limited by enemy level). These blasts are available immediately, but depending upon your mod setup you may need to unlock Power Bash in the Block skill tree.

Power Attack : Apprentice Aimed Spells
Lightning Bolt, Fire Bolt, Ice Spike, Sun Fire - available as soon as you equip a Kynetic Focus.

Forward + Power Attack : Adept AOE Spells
Chain Lightning, Fire Ball, Ice Storm, Vampire's Bane - available once you've learnt the corresponding spell. Hold forward when power attacking to cast.

Weapon Art : Cloak Spells
Lightning Cloak, Flame Cloak, Frost Cloak, Stendarr's Aura - available once you've learnt the corresponding cloak spell. Retains the effect of empowered elements to allow casting of stronger spells. Can be dispelled by activating Weapon Art again, or dispels itself after 30 seconds.

Power Attack + Empowered : Expert Aimed Spells
Thunderbolf, Incinerate, Ice Spear, Turn Greater Undead - available once you've learnt the corresponding spell. If there is not enough magicka, then the Apprentice level spell will cast instead. Forward+PA will still cast the AOE spell.

Weapon Art + Empowered : Master Spells
Shock Explosion, Fire Storm, Blizzard, Bane Of The Undead - available once you've learnt the corresponding master-level spell. From the empowered state, this will detonate (and dispell) the state, casting the corresponding massive damage spell around the caster (Note: Lightning Storm in vanilla is a concentration spell, so it has been replaced by a Shock Explosion in this moveset). If there is not enough magicka to cast you will simple dispell the empowered state, so make sure you MP gauge is full enough.



Requirements
The usual suspects for an MCO setup

• MCO
• OAR
• Payload Interpreter
• AMR
• dTry's Key Utils
  

Recommended

• True Directional Movement (highly recommended for the lock-on feature as the traditional method of precise aiming spells is less reliable)
• Once Click Power Attack (or whatever alternative you prefer, and make sure it's for your correct game version)
• I4 (I've included a very basic icon replacer for the Kynetic Focus so they don't look like greatswords in the inventory)
• Less Visually Obtrusive Cloak Spells (because they're a bit much really)
  

Compatibility
Should be compatible with any mod that alters the vanilla spells, such as Kittytail's Piercing Expert Spells which I'm using in any examples.



Balancing
In this section I'd discuss the balancing of the mod, primarily around the spells' cost. To summarise the below - you may wish to edit the cost of spells in the Kyneticist.INI file by changing the last two values against each spell and match the changes in OAR, to suit your modded game setup. I think the default costs are a good compromise to suit most modded setups.

If you're familiar with payload interpreter you know that the spell cost activated in animations is defined in it's ini file. I have set the cost of spells to 50% of their starting base cost. I chose this because many major perk overhauls (and vanilla) include a perk for half spell cost, and if you're building a destruction made it makes sense you'd have taken these perks. Some overhauls approach this differently by instead giving you ways to increase magicka or making the reduction occur gradually, and you may find the costs are too low making spamming spells easier at lower levels.

Also of consideration is your magicka regen rates. - Vanilla magicka regen is quite low in combat, and several combat mods increase this rate. And also damage scaling - if your mods increase damage output or decrease enemy health to the extent that one firebolt will kill what used to require five firebolts, then low spell cost is OP. I use something close to vanilla both in regen and damage and find the levels work well for my gameplay, but in your setup you might need to enact stricter costs.

If you use MCO it's very possible you use a combat mod that introduces stamina cost for normal attacks. The Kyneticist quick-darts might feel like an unfair advantage as they cost nothing, so consider adding a magicka cost to them. 

The config file is in SKSE\PayloadInterpreter\Config\Kyneticist.ini. Each spell appears in there as a row, and I've tried to put it into a reasonable enough order to make it easy to tell what group of spells you're dealing with. The last two numbers in each row are the magicka cost and requirement (which you'd really expect to always be the same, so change them both) and can be easily edited in Notepad. You also need to make the same changes in game through the OAR menu (shift+O) as the spell animations have magicka requirements there in order to activate. If you increased cost in the INI but not in OAR, you'll see your character use the full casting animation but no spell actually casts.

The other edge of the sword is that the spells don't benefit from enchanted equipment that further lowers the cost of vanilla spells, so actually the Kyneticist spells might cost more magicka than they should. This circles my thought process back around to why I think the 50% is a good static compromise between what's usually possible in the game.

The point of this mod is to make delivering destruction magic more convenient, more often and more fun. If you do want to make changes I suggest don't go overboard with the restrictions - being slightly more OP than a vanilla mage is kind of the point.



Credits
Distar and associates for MCO
dTry for Payload Interpreter
Ershin for Open Animation Replacer
Some movement anims are taken from Kingsglaive so credit to gungun