Soul Gems and Soul Trapping

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OK, I definitely need some help here. I've been doing a little bit of enchanting, but I clearly don't understand the dynamics very well. I understand that you take some magic weapon or item with some magical property you want (but obviously not on an item you want it). You disenchant it, which destroys the item, but you learn the enchantment so you can place it on something else.

Here's what I don't get - it seems like every time I enchant a weapon, I have a finite number of attacks with it before it needs to be recharged. And that the recharging agent is a soul gem. For me, this is problematic as I have a finite number of soul gems, and I am definitely burning through soul gems at a faster rate than I am acquiring them. I actually am carrying around two weapons - the enchanted one I use for big boss fights, with a second unenchanted weapon for general questing. (The base physical damage on the unenchanted one is actually higher, but the enchanted one adds 20 cold damage, which puts it over the top in total damage.)

But it also describes a process that can recharge weapons called Soul Trap and Soul Siphon. Now Soul Siphon appears to be a mage perk, and thus I don't have it, and won't ever get it with this character. But what about Soul Trap? Can anyone use this ability, and is it a means of avoiding having to use Soul Gems? Hey, maybe when you're level 50, Greater Soul Gems can be purchased anywhere and you have so much money you don't care, but not so much for my level 22 guy.

 

Soul Trap is a spell in the Conjuration tree which fills an empty Soul Gem with the soul of a slain enemy. The 'better' the enemy, the higher level gem it fills. You only get like 60 seconds to kill the enemy after casting soul trap. It's a major pain in the proverbials.

 

easy enough to enchant a weapon with soul trap so that you can fill soul gems as you kill enemies. Easy enough to find weapons with soul trap attached to them and soul gems seem to respawn in the college as every time i go home after being out for a while it seems some soul gems have collected in several places and you can also do a quest for one person over and over since he keeps losing a certain alchemy tool and he hands you coins plus an empty soul gem every time. Every time I head home i go looking for the alchemy tool so i can get a soul gem.

Might not be ideal for you but its one way to handle things. Another thing you can do is just have NPCs recharge your magic items.

 

I'm still not getting it - I have a soul stone - I trap a soul in it - and then I use the stone to recharge a weapon. But I can do it with a regular soul stone (without a trapped soul) just as easily. So what is the benefit of soul trapping a soul first? Does it give a bigger recharge benefit than an "empty" soul stone?

 

I don't think you can do anything with an empty soul gem. You will only see the gem in the enchant screen if it's filled.

 

So do most soul gems come pre-filled? I know that I have recharged weapons with regular soul stones I have found. In fact, I have yet to find a soul gem that couldn't be used to recharge a weapon. So then that leads to another question - if all the soul stones I have are filled, then what do empty ones look like - and do they even exist?

 

They look exactly the same, just say 'empty' instead of 'filled' on the caption. I'd say it's about a 50/50 mix when finding soul gems knocking about, as to whether they're filled or not.

 

Am I the only one who wishes that Beth brings back the 'creaturexxx' on the soulgems captions?!

 

Soul Gems come in different sizes from petty to grand telling you what kind of sould can be trapped in it, more powerful monsters have stronger souls.

An empty stone will just say "grand soul stone" if it is filled with a soul it will say "grand soul stone (grand)" a big soul stone can always hold a smaller soul so be careful to check that you have smaller stones in you inventory if you are carrying aroud an expensive empty grand or greater stone, because you'll be quite annoyed to open your inventory and see "grand soul stone (petty)"

To trap souls all you have to do is carry an empty soul stone in you inventory and kill an enemy that is effected by soul trap this can be done in 2 ways, either with the spell 'soul trap' or with a weapon that carries the soul trap enchantment. If you have succeeded there will be a little flash of lightning and a caption will appear on the screen to tell you that a soul has been trapped.

 

If you have Azuras star in your inventory you can enchant the weapon you normally use with soultrap,then use the star to recharge your boss slaying weapon.

 

Empty soulstones say that in the caption, noting (Empty). Otherwise you'll see the size of the soul trapped in the stone, such as Grand Soul Stone (Grand) for the best of them.

The process of trapping the soul isn't really obvious at first, but you need to afflict your enemy with the soultrap effect and kill it before the effect expires. The afflicted enemy has a faint blue aura around them so that you know whether the affliction is in place, and it's possible to re-apply the effect at any time. You can cast it yourself (Conjuration spell, castable by anyone without any prior training, you just need to purchase/find and learn the spell) for a whole 60 seconds duration, or get it semi-automatically from a weapon charge for a few seconds or from a mage perk via casting other spells.

Once you success in killing the afflicted enemy within the given time frame, the soul is captured and tries to fill an empty stone in your inventory in "best match first" manner. E.g. a weakling enemy giving a Petty (smallest) soul searches for an empty Petty soul stone and fills it if there's any in inventory. If there's none, it tries to fill a Lesser stone, if none of those exist either, tries on a Common stone and so forth. Any larger stone filled with a smaller soul is essentially partially wasted as you can't fill them up with the proper one later on.

There's two mutually exclusive, acquirable artifacts in the game that allows for unlimited captures and uses, but you still can't capture more than one soul at a time with it, no matter the size.