I am not a very experienced gamer, but I got Skyrim on my PC recently and have been playing for a few days. I have even leveled up a couple of times and been granted a “perk”. The trouble is I can’t figure out what I am supposed to do with it. What I think you have to do is go to the Skills Menu and “spend” it there to get some special new ability. The Skills menu is weird will all constellations and stuff, but I think I have more or less figured out how to navigate it. It now has a message at the top saying “Perks to increase: 1". I understand, I think, that you can’t use your perk to “buy” a particular sub-skill unless your overall rating for a certain skill “constellation” is sufficiently high, but some of my ratings seem to be high enough. For instance, my two-handed rating is 30 (I have been bashing away at lots of bandits and dragurs with my iron greatsword) and it appears that you only need 20 to get “Champion’s Stance”, but I can’t seem to get it. The obvious thing, clicking on the star, does nothing, and clicking anywhere else generally moves me to another star (that I generally can’t “afford”). I have tried various keys too, but still no dice. What is it that I am not understanding?
Incidentally, the in-game Gameplay Settings menu (within the Pause menu you get with Esc) has me a bit confused too. The options are (mostly) marked with a weird symbol, and if you click it the central part goes away. Have I selected or de-selected the option when this central bit has gone away?
Navigating the menus is not supposed to be that hard part of this, surely?
You have to have Barbarian perk first, plus your character’s general level has to have increased before you’re allowed to purchase perks.
You have to work your way up the constellation, plus keep your character’s general level sufficiently high enough to earn perks at all. You can be level one, with 100 in any given skill, but you’ll not be allowed any perks because you haven’t increased your general level yet.
I am not sure what you mean by “general level”. I have got the Barbarian perk (I think, if I am understanding the menu properly - I am not sure how I got it though) and, like I said, my overall level for two-handed is 30 and the “required” for Champion’s Stance is 20. I also seem to have one “perk to increase”; I just can’t seem to do anything with it.
There’s 3 ‘states’ of each perk. If a perk is available to get, the font is bright white and the star is just a small glow. Once you get the perk, the font is also white but there is an unmistakable huge glowing star in its place. A perk that is unavailable to get, because you haven’t met the level requirement or haven’t gotten previous perks necessary, is dull grey font and not glowing at all. Chances are you don’t have the Barbarian perk and it’s just available for you to get.
Yes, I think that is it. I guess I did not have Barbarian at all. I guess I thought that I already had it because the star was white (when the ones higher up are sort of pinkish) and it was not telling me the “required” level of skill I needed.
Is it typical for games these days to have menus as unintuitive as this? Is figuring it out supposed to be part of the game’s challenge or something?
No, it’s just inexplicably bad interface design. I think they built it with inexplicable assumption that one people who had played previous Elder Scrolls games would have interest in Skyrim.
Basically for the perks, anything directly below a perk, on the line…is required. It’s kind of annoying. And as for the menus…well it takes some getting used to that’s for sure. I did get frustrated with the item menu though and ended up getting a mod that makes it MUCH easier to look through my items. It’s called SkyUI and I love it.
You have to start at the bottom of each skill tree and put at least one point in. This opens up the pathways. It is not necessary to do 5 out of 5 but you may wish to depending on your play style.
Also, in the smithing tree you don’t have to do both sides of it to get to dragon smithing, even though it looks like you have to. One side applies to heavy armor while the other side does light.
UESP Wiki page on skills for more than you ever wanted to know:
An important point; you can only go up the skill tree, not down. So if you, say, work your way up the Heavy Armor side of the Smithing tree, you can’t go back down the Light Armor side and grab the highest level Light Armor Smithing perk; you have to go all the way up the Light Armor side too if you want it.
While I had complaints about Skyrim I didn’t find perks or the skills screen hard to use or understand. Really my only issue with skils was that the combat ones were them were miles better than non combat. Well, other than crafting skills, which were probably a little too good.