Skyrim - my story of woe :p

So I recently tried again to beat Skyrim. And again, I failed in a manner that was unfortunately not epic in any way.

The 2nd attempt was actually worse than the first

I simply find that as I level up, my character gets progressively weaker than the monsters. My latest char I've all but given up on, is only level 21... but he cannot progress. He has 60+ skill in illusion, but sadly this does not help him in the dungeons, where all undead are immune to all illusion spells.

He tried to level up conjuration to do some damage, but it simply would not skill up for him. He cast his familiar every fight, and his skill is still only 25, lagging far behind even his lock-picking skills. And this is something he was actively trying to level up, whereas lock-picking I didn't even want (but I compulsively have to pick locks I find )

So I said "screw it", gave up on summons and started using Destruction school. This is now his 2nd highest skill, behind illusion (skill 54). Trouble is, killing a single "Daugr Wight" takes more than all of his available mana, and they normally come in twos or threes. Meaning I kill one, then have to run out of the dungeon to recharge. It's extremely silly playstyle and deeply frustrating.

So basically at level 21, with Adept Destruction spells (fireball mostly), a single cast takes off about 10% of the Daugr health, and I have mana to cast it about 5 times before running out. This is a normal Daugr for my level (called "Daugr Wight" I think at about level 20).

The real kick in the testicles is that an NPC companion, using the same spell, kills a Daugr in two casts, because Skyrim scales NPC magic damage with level. It sadly does NOT scale the player's damage with level, so a level 20 player does the same damage with a fireball as a level 50 player.

(I must admit I play Skyrim without companions. The fact that they can't die makes the game stupidly trivial if you bring them with you. And the immense irritation of having to travel so slowly on foot so the companion AI can keep up with you, makes the experience of taking companions utterly infuriating.)

I would really like to finish this game. But both of my chars with 50+ hours on each are just getting their asses handed to them, because both rely on Destruction magic for damage, and you just can't kill even a single mob without running out of mana.

Maybe it's bad luck; maybe I just suck at this game. But the feeling of getting weaker and weaker as you level up makes Skyrim a bit of a unique experience for me.

I suspect there are "builds" that work and builds that don't, and I've just created two chars with builds that don't work. But it's a shame that the game lets you invest 50 hours into it before letting you know you're going to have to start again.

Ahh Skyrim. I have spent hundreds of hours modding it ... never played it much.

You have been picking appropriate perks, right?

Also dabbling in lots of enchanting to obtain magicka regen - you can learn the magicka regen enchantment by destroying some robes at an enchantment table!

In fact if you wanna send me your save I'll take a look at what you've been up to and give you some further pointers!

Psymonkee said:

You have been picking appropriate perks, right?

Also dabbling in lots of enchanting to obtain magicka regen - you can learn the magicka regen enchantment by destroying some robes at an enchantment table!

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Yes I'm trying to get enchanting up now as my last resort. It's hugely expensive tho. Meaning you have to do a lot of dungeon crawls to get the money... and my guy can't do the dungeon crawls because he's so weak in combat

Catch 22 I fear now.

Skyrim appears to very much be a game where you have to make every decision with foreknowledge, otherwise you get stuck in a no-win situation.

Or just use console codes to get dat cha-ching, yo Ain't nobody got time fo dat.

I completed the main storyline of skyrim once, but I never finished all the side quests.

I always focused on destruction, restoration and light armour to get them super high as quick as I could and then worked on alteration/conjuration afterwards.

I always enjoyed using magic over weapons started it again the other week and want to go for more focus on weapons/archery and heavy armour instead of magic.

FoxEye said:

Yes I'm trying to get enchanting up now as my last resort. It's hugely expensive tho. Meaning you have to do a lot of dungeon crawls to get the money... and my guy can't do the dungeon crawls because he's so weak in combat

Catch 22 I fear now.

Skyrim appears to very much be a game where you have to make every decision with foreknowledge, otherwise you get stuck in a no-win situation.

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chuck us your save file - I wanna see if this is salvageable!

Oh and you don't need money for enchanting. Five finger discount on the soul gems and kill random folk out in the wild

The games not terribly well balanced sadly as my sneaky archer character absolutely annihilated all of the content on the game including the DLC without much effort, yet I also gave up on magic based characters in the past due to how infuriating the play style is. On my last magic character, I ended up using a crossbow from one of the DLC things as it hit harder than my spells did lol.

I found when doing a magic build, alchemy played a crucial part to make boosts and magic restore potions. You also need to be using wards affectively to dispel incoming damage, mages are very squishy and need to either be quick to evade or be able to protect themselves.

Mixing decent potions/food with wards and destruction spells does well, frost spells can also slow the enemy down to give you more time.

As far as levelling goes the game is horrid just look at how merchants, etc. level with you... horrid.

With such a clunky interface and terrible mechanics for doing stuff I found my enjoyment of what was otherwise a great game severely eroded and gave up on it.

EDIT: I actually did some of the hardest content in the game, at level 7, without an NPC companion (as I hadn't actually got one yet) by kiting and similar techniques mis-using the map geometry :S i.e. getting them to chase me around corners until I got to a bit where I could drop down back to the start of the map whereby the ai would turn around and take the long way back to get me so I could wear them down.

James J said:

The games not terribly well balanced sadly as my sneaky archer character absolutely annihilated all of the content on the game including the DLC without much effort, yet I also gave up on magic based characters in the past due to how infuriating the play style is. On my last magic character, I ended up using a crossbow from one of the DLC things as it hit harder than my spells did lol.

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The biggest problem for magic characters is that Skyrim does not scale magic damage with player level.

With melee and archery, when you level up you do more damage with the same weapon.

With magic, when you level up the damage remains static. BUT... NPC mages DO scale their magic damage with level.

So player mages get a unique disadvantage for no logical reason whatsoever. It just seems so stupid. Player and NPC archers + melee scale, NPC mages scale, player mages do not. Why Bethesda, why? Do you want me to spend half my play time navigating the menus to drink potions? Not to mention foraging for plants to make said potions?

Is it too much to ask to have the mana to finish one opponent without drinking a bunch of potions that require 30 mins to gather and create?

Just seems so crap when melee and archers do not have any of these problems. Seems like mages got hit hard with the nerf stick.

Melee and block is OP i went thief with maxed out sneak and 1h sword with block and demolished it and had to quit. Magic i duno some bosses really did hit outragously hard on my thief to the point i would send in the companion and use my bow with the sneak multiplier on him.

Draugur were the ones that got tough later on too, There is just too much to do in the game and frankly combat is boring after 160 hours of the same stuff. I duno how you have not given up tbh just casting spells and stuff lol. Dragons were the only thing that would perk my interest as i had mighty dragons and double the size for a bit. And they would literally just eat all the npcs unless i fled indoors and spent 20 mins with a bow lol.

I think at one point i had managed to lure one to near the town and had myself and around 15 npcs on one and then a walking faction patrol came along and started interacting too. Pretty cool i even had two once but ran as there was no way i was spending an hour killing two dragons.

The original mechanics are dull, magic being the most dull part aswell.

You do really need mods for those elements.

I'm currently playing through it with the idea of building an Arcane Archer. Only at Lv.13 at the moment though, but he's holding his own.

Just do the Smith exploit thing, I do

Just smith Iron Daggers over and over, which is Leather strips and Iron bars.

Go to white run, you got the woman and the guy inside the smithing area who sell iron ore/bars leather/leather strips, also that guy up by the companions place with the big forge

create daggers, sell them, think you skip time by three days I think and repeat.

I've levelled up a lot

FoxEye said:

Yes I'm trying to get enchanting up now as my last resort. It's hugely expensive tho. Meaning you have to do a lot of dungeon crawls to get the money... and my guy can't do the dungeon crawls because he's so weak in combat

Catch 22 I fear now.

Skyrim appears to very much be a game where you have to make every decision with foreknowledge, otherwise you get stuck in a no-win situation.

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Sort of true, but that comes with experience. Once you play the game for 20 hours, you'll have a good grasp of the crafting system. Also, wear the correct armour etc. Don't walk around in heavy armour and try not to get hit too often. Obvious reason for not being hit aside, you will only level up your armour quicker which in turn, levels you up more quickly. Downside of this is that your damage skills (archery, destruction etc) doesn't keep up and you end up with tough enemies and weak destruction.

As you say, it does take forward planning, but only really to the level of knowing what character type and style you want to play as. Same as any bethesda game really.

I seriously want to play Skyrim again, but I need a new GPU to take advantage of all the mods I like

Uncle_Gravy said:

Just do the Smith exploit thing, I do

Just smith Iron Daggers over and over, which is Leather strips and Iron bars.

Go to white run, you got the woman and the guy inside the smithing area who sell iron ore/bars leather/leather strips, also that guy up by the companions place with the big forge

create daggers, sell them, think you skip time by three days I think and repeat.

I've levelled up a lot

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This. But before you sell them, enchant them also. It will level up your enchantment and you'll gain more money. I can very much recommend a soul catching weapon or spell and get a good stock of gems.

It may be the nature of the destruction tree, but I levelled up TOO fast to the point where I was ambidextrously one-shotting almost everything in my path. It became very boring after that.

Got the same issue with FO4 at the minute where my laser rifles is one-shotting all bipeds with accurate headshots.

It may be due to going after all the sidequests and levelling higher than the main objective needs.

Not played Skyrim, but this sort of thing is what killed Oblivion for me.

Memory a bit hazy now, but I think I went for a sneaky thief type character, concentrated on sneaky thiefy things, before realising (too late) that levelling up my thief skills was causing the monsters to level up and become terrifyingly tough - even the most innocuous of wildlife was enough to cause me problems. And you can't sneak everywhere in the wild.

I spent hours conjuring up zombies and killing them with arrows to try and develop some abilities to give myself a chance in battle, but that process killed the enjoyment of the game and I stopped playing.

Is it still the case that your core abilities have the effect of levelling up the monsters, but non-core abilities don't affect levelling at all?

cheesyboy said:

Is it still the case that your core abilities have the effect of levelling up the monsters, but non-core abilities don't affect levelling at all?

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No, it's much worse in Skyrim. ALL your abilities are core abilities, and you will get a level roughly every 5 skill ups.

So if you do a bit of sneaking, lock picking, or alchemy.. you will level up. And you won't want to

Basically this:

I tried magic builds and found the same as you OP.

I like to keep vanilla as it is, even though I've got 100+ mods, the perk and leveling system is the same as vanilla.

Anywayyyyy, I love playing sneaky sneaky. If you've got 60+ perks in Illusion, have you got the silent cast yet? My current guy is sneaky illusionist, I rarely use my dagger, I use calm and fury hand in hand to force everyone to fight each other as I sit in the shadows. The winner is ultimately calmed, as he casually talks to me whilst I line up to slit his throat.

It wasn't easy at first, this build. But once I got the silent cast and perk to have my spells work on undead, the game was won. This is a 90 skill perk though. Cast muffle on your self constantly, it's kind of cheating, but not really if you think that if you had the ability to recast something over and over to learn how to do it better in RL, you would right? So yea, keep casting muffle on your self when ever you get the chance.