[QUOTE=puppygod]
I know what kind of character NOT to build - I did one that was fun initially, but failed miserably. It was silver-tongued thief and archer, excelling also in alchemy (mostly for poisoned arrows). It was fun to play initially, but ultimately become totally unplayable. Every NPC loved me. Plundering castles was fun. And sneak attacks on unsuspecting enemies also. But any wilderness encounter become sudden death. Damn, even mere imp or goblin eventually could off me with couple of hits. Not to mention some vampires or mages. Put me off of game for like two years.
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I did the exact. same. thing. I wanted a scout/thief type, so I built a wood elf who focused on stealth, archery, and alchemy, and rocked the freaking hizzouse for about 12-14 levels before the random encounters began to hand out smackdowns.
In order to amend what I thought I’d done wrong, my next character was a beatdown-shaped tank with an ungodly amount of armor and weapons… but she began to fail around 7-10 when I started running into trolls and ogres who wasted no time pointing out how vulnerable I was without any combat magic. Enchanted weapons helped, but I ended up wasting most of my carrying capacity hauling around enough magic broadswords to let me play through entire missions with weapons that dealt magical damage.
Having sadly decided that my wonderful tank had little chance of successfully completing the game, I created a pure mage who obviously didn’t have enough planning put into her design, as she had the unfortunate habit of dying whenever a stiff breeze passed through the area.
Anyway, long story short: I’ve found that if you want to go with any kind of stealth specialist, it’s best to gain ungodly amounts of points in Illusion: doing so gives you the invisibility spells, which are handy, and the paralysis spells, which are instant death for well over 70% of the enemies you’ll meet: with decent stealth scores you can shoot an enemy to draw him away from his group, paralyze him once he’s out of sight, and finish him off while he’s down.
I didn’t have too much of a problem with the leveling system, but then again the only character I’ve played has been a big dumb fighter Nord that I built in a way that I could control my leveling to the point where I could maximize my stat gain, and spent a significant amount of time doing nothing but leveling, making sure I gained just the right amount of skill points relevant to the stats I wanted so that I could get the +5 bonus when I leveled.
Basically, I made sure that I had at least one skill governed by each stat as a minor skill, so I could work on just that skill and not worry about being forced to level before I got 10 points overall. Hence, I had Block as a minor skill, and spent let mudcrabs whack on my shield for hours so I can get that +5 endurance bonus when I took my level-raising nap.
I could understand that the leveling system can make it tricky for players who prefer spell-casters or thief-types, but as one who prefers just running up and bashing things, it worked out pretty well for me without using any mods or level avoidance.
[QUOTE=VCO3]
My totally awesome wiz got me a 360 and a bunch of games for Christmas, including “Oblivion,” which I’ve been lusting after for a while.
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Excuse me. I hate to hijack with something completely and totally off topic…but did you just use the term ‘wiz’ to refer to your girlfriend? As in ''wisdom"?? That is a particular form of slang that I wouldn’t have pegged you to use, so I am curious as hell…Maybe I am way off?
[QUOTE=Nzinga, Seated]
Excuse me. I hate to hijack with something completely and totally off topic…but did you just use the term ‘wiz’ to refer to your girlfriend? As in ''wisdom"?? That is a particular form of slang that I wouldn’t have pegged you to use, so I am curious as hell…Maybe I am way off?
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I made a lizard guy and went heavy on stealth, acrobatics, thievery, etc. We’ll see how it goes.
After the first ~4 hours of playing, I’m absolutely in love with the game. It’s pretty much the perfect “write your own story” role-playing game, and the world is just beautiful. It does take things a little far with the “realism” - I hate only being able to carry a certain amount of things in a game - and I’ve accidentally jumped to my death a few times when I was just trying to descend a hill quicker than I was walking - but the upside is the gorgeous, truly “living” world.