Skyrim - my story of woe :p

Psymonkee, I've spent a couple days now thinking about how to roll a new char (I've given up on the one in the save I sent you.)

I'm looking for synergy. I've decided to avoid Destruction magic because it's so weak. So there will be no Destruction in my build, at all. It's too crap.

I'd still like to have Illusion as my main skill.

Archery is two handed and thus you can't cast anything whilst holding a bow. So, for example, you could't kill an enemy mage with a bow as an Illusionist/Archer, because you'd be unable to use your wards and the bow at the same time.

I'm well aware of the Illusionist/Backstab build, which is totally broken. Invis, backstab, invis, backstab. I'm not going to play that, it would be boring beyond belief.

Illusionist/1H fighter is pretty much a non-starter. Without armour, going toe-to-toe with an orc fighter, or the draugr, is pretty much instant death. 1H or 2H /has/ to be paired with either light or heavy armour, and either block or restoration. Anything else is suicide. NPC mages can get away with it because they cheat (they get more health and more defence player has).

So I'm all for playing smarter. But the game, because it requires magic to be "equipped" like a weapon, offers little to no synergy with anything else. This is one of the biggest flaws with Skyrim. Oblivion didn't suffer from this. It also means that a lot of my time is spent navigating menus rather than playing the game.
 
Skyrim can be brutal, even on the Normal difficulty.

Was walking along the road just outside a major city. I hear the "zzzap" of lightning, and my guy falls down dead. No idea who did it, or why. I think the game is just telling me to go to bed :p

NPC mages, btw, are brutal. So sad that the player cannot reach the heights of uber-powerful magic that NPCs have access to.
 
When does enchanting get powerful, btw? I'm at 50/100 skill, and the stuff I can make is absolute tosh. Like +5 to a skill, or +15% resistance, with a Grand Soul Gem.
 
Very annoying. The Wiki is full of completely wrong information. Apparently the wardrobes in the room you are assigned in the Winterhold College are safe to store things in. The wiki even says "all wardrobes" are safe and do not respawn.

So I put all my gear in there. And of course the wiki is wrong, the room completely respawns, and all my gear is gone.

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Containers#Safe_Containers

^^Complete garbage info.
 
I would really like to finish this game. But man, the difficulty spikes are /insane/.

Travelling on foot for about 30 mins, exploring and generally avoiding fights (calm is great). Then an "Ancient Vampire" jumps at me. Casting non-stop ice spells with one hand and life drain with the other, whilst walking backwards out of melee range so I can't get a hit in.

Immune to my spells (illusion). Immune to Turn Undead ("too powerful for this spell"). Can't be poisoned (undead).

I knew straight away I was dead, and using health pots was just delaying the inevitable. I couldn't run because the ice spells freeze me. I couldn't hurt the vampire with anything in my arsenal. There was nothing to do but die after running out of potions, and lose 30 mins of play time.

So I restart, walk for 5 mins and get attacked by two snow bears. Normally I just calm them and move on. "Too powerful for this spell." But wait, I've got the perks! Nope, too powerful, sorry. Try to run. Snow bears run faster than /sprinting speed/. And kill in two hits. And there are two of them. Dead again.

It does seem that about level 20 I just hit a brick wall in this game.

Maybe it's because I do too much alchemy/smithing/whatever, and the game expects you not to do that until much later? It seems that I'd be better off just focusing 100% on combat skills until level 50, and do the crafting after that.
 
I've mostly just got unenchanted stuff as that's all that the game has given me, so far. The stuff with minor enchantments has been disenchanted :p He's only L24, and the game doesn't really drop magic stuff in abundance at that level.

The silly thing is that after re-loading, the Ancient Vampire was replaced (near the same spot) with a Fledgling Vampire, who got torn to pieces by a passing wolf. The Ancient otoh is an unstoppable killing machine at my level, immune to everything and anything. Couldn't even get a hit in. Skyrim is just very random and very spiky.
 
Rroff said:
My character was only L17 and had loads of apparel with decent bonuses and that really makes a difference - though the game really obfuscates it which annoys the **** out of me - really sloppy development.

With the stuff I had it boosted Magika by 50%, Magika regeneration by 200%, spells cost 50% less to cast and also had a fairly decent boost to health amount and fire resistance all from apparel before any other stats and someone who'd invested a bit more time into the game (I played it pretty casual) could probably do a bit better than that.
Click to expand...

Really? That's insane. I've got nothing like that. Nothing like that has dropped in dungeons or been available to buy. Out of curiosity where did you get that all from? At level 17...!

My original char from years ago didn't even have that at level 46!
 
Just base game and Hearthfire. No mods.

e: Just about every night I bump into a vampire in a random encounter outdoors. They aren't rare by any stretch :p
 
I'm wondering at this point if the level scaling for random encounters is bugged. I keep getting random encounters (all over the world) that are much, much higher level than my char.

Latest dick move by the game: I'm near Markarth, and the game spawns a party of Thalmor to attack me. I've not bothered them before. But hey, they're hostile for whatever reason.

So I do my usual calm/frenzy tactic, but all I get is "too powerful for this spell".

Seriously, if anyone wants to play with Illusion, get very, very used to reading "too powerful for this spell". Like, all the time :/

So I check the wiki, and to cast Storm Atronach they must have been min 8 levels higher than me.

Now that in itself is not a problem. For melee builds, you'd still smack them around like it was nothing. But spellcasters have strict level caps on their spells. You can dual cast, but the mana cost is so prohibitive you run out of mana in two spells (literally!)

Why Beth put level caps in place for spellcasters (specifically for Illusion) I just don't understand. If you're going to have random encounters where mobs are much, much higher level, but you're going to let melee be fine with that, why gimp magic/Illusion so that none of your spells work?

Grrr. Why do I keep playing this? It just makes me mad!
 
Well, persevering but I'm finding it tough atm. Everywhere I go at level 30 enemies are 1-hit killing me.

I can't believe this is "Normal" difficulty. The only way to stay alive is not to let anything hit me. Weirdly, this isn't a "no armour" playthrough either. I'm wearing light armour; the best stuff I can find or make. But it can't be doing much, because I can't take a hit at all.

Obviously if I come across a lower level enemy "ie Bandit" that isn't levelled with me, it's the other way round. But against my own level enemies, ie "Bandit Marauder" or "Chief", it's all 1-hit kills against me.

There doesn't seem to be any middle ground in this game. I just have to keep reloading the same ecounter over and over, until I somehow find a way to use the geometry to get the NPCs stuck somewhere. It's a bit crap, tbh, but it's the only way to stay alive.
 
Light Amour skill is about 50. 1-handed weapons skill is 60. With a bound mystic sword I take most stuff down in 8-12 hits. Dragons in about 10 hits.

It's funny, a dragon bite takes a bit less than half my health, but I've yet to be 1 hit KO'd by one. The bandits are much, much more lethal than the dragons :p Go figure...

It does kind of wreck the immersion, after having an epic (but fair) five minute fight vs a dragon, to come across a bandit who kills you with 1 arrow :p
 
Hmmmmm. Well I maxed my enchanting, and I have a real dilemna now.

Double enchanted gear with max enchanting skill is too powerful. Even without using any potions, just enchanting on it's own with the perks.

It renders anything I could loot worthless. I don't really like that. Even limiting myself to max -50% spell cost, I can have so many +mana and +mana regen items that I realistically cannot run out of mana.

I can also have +80% resistance to anything I want, any time I want. +50% to all resists on my gear plus one potion.

I'm not sure if this is something they intended. But it doesn't seem like much fun now as no spell caster is a threat any more.

It's just a shame the game is so polarised. Either you're getting 1-hit killed or you make yourself a god. I really wish there was something in between.

I have about 50 smithing now. And even with that (low) level of skill, my weapons are better than anything that could drop.

So it really does seem that smithing and enchanting (either, or, or both) really do break the game. With either of them there is no longer a challenge. With both of them it's just sad.

Trouble is, having levelled up many times from smithing and enchanting, I almost must use them now or I'm back to being 1-hit killed.

I think I'll just finish the damn game and stop trying to fix all the glaring issues with its design. I don't think you can play it properly without mods, after all. I'd been trying to avoid that, but the base game is just a joke (game mechanics, not the world which is beautiful).
 
I think in my case I will simply limit myself to only 1 of each type of enchantment. No potions of enchanting allowed, and no +alchemy gear allowed when making potions. We'll see how that goes.

Hopefully then some of the looted gear will be better.
 
An example of what I mean, about there being little middle ground.

Was in Ysgramor's Tomb, and you fight a bunch of mobs all called "Companion Ghost". In one room, the first two die in one hit each. They do almost no damage to me if they hit.

The third mob in the room, with the same name as the other two, one-hit kills *me* from almost full health.

There is no middle ground! On a harder difficulty two of those mobs would have been challenging and one impossible.

On an easier difficulty one "normal" mob and two trivial mobs.

But on the middle/default difficulty, two of those mobs are trivial and one insta-gibs me as I run up to it. Does that not strike anyone as strange?

Anyway, I've found out a bit about why NPCs have are able to kill you from almost full health. The game mechanics are truly awful in this regard.

In order to determine if an NPC can one-hit kill you, the game calculates how hard the NPC would hit /if you had no armour on/. If the hit would kill you with no armour on, the NPC does a "killing blow" animation.

In other words, killing blows completely ignore your armour. The more you invest in armour and defense, the more this game mechanic laughs in your face.

With a lot of armour, an ordinary hit might barely scratch you, but you might still get insta-gibbed by a "finishing blow" at 80%+ health.

You almost couldn't invent worse mechanics if you tried.
 
Must admit, I've remembered why I stopped playing the first time :p

Once you've seen all the different kinds of dungeons (ice cave/ falmer cave/ dwemer ruins, etc), you've basically seen it all. The "quests" are all pretty much identical: go here, obtain or kill this one thing, come back.

I'm not sure where the genuinely interesting quests are hiding. Anyone want to suggest a really good quest to do?
 
Meh, this game is so crap in terms of combat systems.

Went back to the main quest, met Delphine, went to dragon burial site. For laughs, decided to see what happens if I do nothing at all. She spanks the dragon single handedly without taking any damage. *Any* damage.

"Why does the game need me, exactly? Delphine is clearly more badass then I am. Those dragons eat me in two hits, but can't so much as put a scratch in her."

It is just pathetic. I reload, attack the dragon in close combat as she does, and it proceeds to eat me. I have 330 health, I'm guessing Delphine has eleventy billion, like the other NPCs. It's just plain crap, and makes a mockery of the whole game.

If you take a follower with you, you can complete the whole game without taking any action yourself. Just let your (unkillable) follower destroy everything. They are much, much better at taking and dealing damage than the player can ever be. It makes you feel extremely stupid for playing. Why bother when you will never be as good as your NPC companions?

And why did Beth make every quest related NPC unkillable? And all NPC followers? It's just a cop out.
 
Well I stopped playing this anyway, in favour of getting through (some of) the vast legion of unplayed Steam games I have in my library :p

Glad I did tbh, Skyrim had become a chore to play. Same thing happened the first time I played it. At some point, you aren't having fun anymore, but the game is so bloody huge you keep playing somehow :p Playing something else really made me realise how little I'd been enjoying Skyrim.
 
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