I’m having a bit of a hard time understanding the way that skills develop in this game. I have a lizard guy with stealth and acrobatics and stuff, so I want him to be a stealthy guy that pick off enemies with a bow, but my bow skills totally suck. When I’m firing even silver arrows at wolves, it does almost literally NO damage. I’ve been using light swords a lot, and it seems I’ve gotten way good at that - but I want to make my bow skills better. How do I do it?
Also, I slept and randomly leveled up. What’s up with that?
Sleeping is how you level up. There is an icon that appears to the right of the compass that looks like an arrow pointing up with some other design around it. After you sleep you level up. Increasing your main skills is what determines when you level up.
Your skill with a bow is based on your agility stat (I believe) and once you become a Journeyman of Marksmanship you get a zoom function when you use a bow. Agility also increases the damage you inflict by using a bow, so increase your agility stat as much as possible if you want a good bowman. I’ve never done this as I prefer blades. Shortswords rule. I’ve never made much use of bows.
It’s a difficult system to get used to. I still don’t know how to level efficiently. I use a mod that gives me automatic +5 modifiers every time I level. Cheating by some standards, but I don’t like the leveling system. Of course if you’re on a 360 or PS “triple” this point is wasted.
I read somewhere that the best way to exploit the system is to design a character around the most useless skills, skills you’ll almost never use. That way, you almost never level up, even though the skills you do use go through the roof. The advantage to this is that the creatures power up as you level, not as your skills go up; you can end up with a master-level archery skill and still be fighting level 1 creatures.
I’ve read of that strategy too, but then you wind up fighting ipms, mudcrabs and rats endlessly. Besides it takes a LONG time and effort to get to mastery in many skills.
First off, make sure that you draw the arrow all the way back before firing. Second, realize that archery is only really useful if your target can’t see you (so you get sneak attack damage). Poison also helps, and you can make some decent stuff out of dirt cheap ingredients if you have alchemy leveled.
A really easy, really cheesy way to get better at alchemy is to go to a trainer, learn 5 ranks of marksman, then spend a few minutes auto-walk sneaking in a corner behind an innkeeper until you get 5 ranks of sneak. If these two are major skills for you, this will give you the 10 points you need to gain a level (sleep to level up), and you should be able to get +5 to agility (luck also helps weapon damage). Rinse and repeat until you’re a badass archer or out of money.
Err, archery. You could also train 5 ranks in a non-agility secondary skill (that won’t give you experience points) and just gain 10 ranks of sneak for a slightly better attribute increase. Sites like gamefaqs.com have guides that explain the system for leveling up in detail.
I like to do kiting with my archer if my sneak attack doesn’t kill them. Get your speed and acrobatics high enough and you can run circles around virtually any enemy in the game.
Some skills can be levelled easily in the game world, and there isn’t any point in taking them as primaries. Alchemy, Security, Acrobatics, Sneak, Speechcraft, Mercantile and so on are pretty much a waste of a pick…though I’d say for a starting thief take acrobatics and sneak if you want to survive in the early stages. Sneak because you need it and I think it’s a pain to train it up, acrobatics because jumping up on rocks and peppering a helpless target with arrows will be a necessary survival skill for weeks to come. But by default, armor, weapon and spell skills are what you should take for your 7 main abilities.
After much Oblivion playing I think the real challenge is making a character that isn’t doomed to the battlemage default of crouching behind a shield, casting touch destructive spells. I started playing an Orc warrior with restoration and sign of the atronach last week, I think he’s pretty neat.
Making the whole world level up as your character does only added to the basic flaw in the system that was already inherent in Morrowind. There you would never be able to achieve maximum advancement unless you built against type, but that was only an issue for a certain kind of nerdy completism. But in Oblivion, the whole world gets better at combat every time you get better at Speechcraft, so if you want your smooth talking character to survive, his social skills had better not be class skills.
They put a huge bottleneck on how much money you can make selling items to merchants so that you can’t become rich just because you went up a level and suddenly the lowliest bandit is wearing daedric armor, yet they made the Alchemy skill into a license to print money. Go figure.
After a few months of hiatus due to me breaking our first xbox 360, I’m back “in touch” with my Level 24 vampire-infected mage. I’m pretty much a battlemage, even though that is not my actual class. My physical and combat/armor skills are much more developed than my magic just because of the way I tend to enjoy playing the game. I hide behind my shield and then clobber opponents more often than hurling spells at them. I’ve been leveling up very quickly lately, and I have not been utilizing all of my training slots, which I hope doesn’t bite me in the ass later.
I was infected with vampirism quite early and have gotten very accustomed to the various trade-offs by now. I’m still slowly churning away at the vampire cure quest, but the last time I tried to visit the old lady who knows the cure, I got stuck between daylight outside her cabin, and the creatures she conjures inside her cabin, and I ended up having to restore to an older saved game.
IIRC, you can also get cured at Deepscorn Hollow, if you have that expansion installed.
As for the OP - I almost never use Marksman, except for a certain Dark Brotherhood contract. I use various spells for distance attacks, and blades for close combat/sneak attacks, so I’m not much help. But for leveling up – on the 360, at least, you get a message in the upper left corner that says “You should rest and meditate on what you’ve learned,” and that means you’re ready to level up.
Here’s a really useful site, so you can find trainers and whatnot – but beware of spoilers if you look for help on specific quests!
Oh, the game is wicked broken if you let it be. It’s not nearly as extreme as Morrowind could be, but the potential is there.
Get your alchemy to a high enough level and you can combine flour and a strawberry into a potion that, among other things, gives you like 24% damage reflection. Drink four of these potions, and your foes will kill themselves as they barely wound you at all. Combine an orange with a tomato (or maybe an onion), and you get a potion that gives shield, detect life, and restore fatigue; the only drawback is that you’ll be burdened by 1 pound for 1 second. Combine flour, a strawberry, an orange, and a tomato, and you get all of the above.
Combine vampire dust, frost salts, imp gall, and a spiddal stick for a wickedly potent poison. Snipe an ogre with it and it’ll die before it reaches you.
Master alchemy and you can turn a single bloodgrass into a great chameleon potion. Drink three at once, and you’ll be completely undetectable while sneaking. You can even sneak attack any foe over and over (6x damage bypassing armor if you have sneak mastered).
You’ve been working on marksmanship, right? If not, that’s why, and if you have a weak bow you won’t get one shot kills. Silver arrows are not top of the line either.
