So I just got this game and after about 20 or 30 hours of play I maxxed smithing, enchanting and alchemy and I have maxxed out armor, magic resistance, and my sword does over 500 damage.
I can oneshot almost anything and I am now working on archery so I don’t have to bother chasing things down to one shot them.
Another cheap way to level destruction is to stand in the fire pit/forge in Riften. I was screwing around as my thief and standing in there. After taking a few ticks of damage from the fire, my destruction somehow leveled.
I made the mistake of maxing out my first character and the game got boring before I had completed the main quest.
That’s one thing I’ve read conflicting information about. Some people seem to think the enemies level up at about the same rate you do but, in my experience, I started kicking their ass once I got smithing maxed.
The danger seems to be power-leveling very early in the game. Apparently going artificially heavy in support like Alchemy or Enchanting at the start of the game ( i.e. “iron daggering” your way up ) without having some combat skills developed as well can easily lead to you getting your ass kicked a lot. Enemies do level to some extent.
But once you get things like Archery, One or Two-handed or Destruction to a decent level, the sky is the limit and the crafting lines pump your power almost exponentially.
For me, the way to keep the game enjoyable/challenging for the longest time is to really try to role play the character and to not go overboard trying to squeeze every point of damage out of crafting/alchemy. What I mean is, my character is a spell-sword and I’m trying to play a gritty good guy, so I don’t do every quest like the thieves guild or the dark brotherhood quests. I’ve maxed out my smithing and enchanting, but I don’t then create a bunch of uber smithing potions and enchanting gear to kick it up the effectiveness of my arms and armor to an insane degree. I also don’t pay for training so that I don’t level up too quickly.
I started out spreading my perks around pretty evenly between Destruction, Sneaking, Archery, Smithing, Enchanting, and Alchemy, but then I focused on applying all of the possible perks to Enchanting and Smithing. Meanwhile, I was still picking tons of ingredients and brewing potions and I’m pretty sure I actually brought my Alchemy skill to 100 prior to anything else. The problem was, I’d done all of that concocting with only a couple of low level Alchemy perks, so my trunks are now overflowing with tons of low value, half beneficial, half damaging potions that are of no real use to me directly and are a tedious pain in the butt to liquidate.
And just so I’m not confused, when folks are saying ‘maxed out’ do they mean skill level of 100+ or that all perk points have been applied, or both?
I meant maxed out at 100 with most of the perk tree filled in, but I don’t know if that’s what other people mean. For smithing, I went up the heavy armor tree, to get to dragon armor, but didn’t add any points to the light armor tree. But I don’t like the dragon armor, so I’m staying with the ebony because it looks so cool.
I was just about to write what Tamerlane said.
I’ve never been a big fan of crafting in RPGs. Some is okay, but spending huge amounts of time crafting hundreds of daggers or potions or magic trinkets isn’t really my idea of heroic. It also makes treasure hunting and defeating bosses anti-climactic. Why care about Big Baddy’s Black Blade of Buggery when you can make a hundred swords twice as good anytime you want?
MM’s suggestion of roleplaying is a good one and it seems to help a lot for me, but I think I might have to work on a no crafting mod later.
I’m playing a fighter type, and I tried to keep my Smithing within 5-10 points of my One-Handed and Heavy Armor skills (with my Enchanting lagging behind). I think I got a well-balanced, not overpowered character.
I started by doing all my crafting using found materials, mainly leather, so it didn’t level too fast. When I got to 80 or so Smithing, I got impatient and finished with iron daggers.
Alchemy seems a bit harder to level than in Oblivion, closer to Morrowind perhaps. This is helped by the fact that every lootable house in Oblivion had like 20 apples and bread each, and these could be used in Alchemy, unlike in Skyrim.
I only train on skills I rarely use, like Conjuration or Heavy Armor. This is partially practical; it’s way cheaper to train low skills. Also, I’d rather level my heavily-used skills naturally.
Coming from spending most of my gametime with MMOs, minmaxxing is kind of a habit and tradeskills have always been a way of marginally improving your character in a “necessary but not sufficient” sort of way. IOW maxxing out tradeskills might lead to “best in slot” items in one maaaaybe two slots out of a dozens slots. Tradeskills are kind of broken and noone is going to organically improve their tradeskills so everyone who does tradeskills grinds them, they are simply exercising different levels of restraint in limiting their grinding.
Yeah I started a new character and limited my smithing to my highest warrior skill, I limited enchanting to my highest magic skill and I limited alchemy to my highest thief skill and it got a lot more challenging especially since you tend to only build only one tree. I think this would have been a reasonable and effective limit on the tradeskills.
I wish enemies dropped more interesting loot. As it is, if you want uber gear you have to max out smithing/enchanting. I wish it was possible to get truly unique items by defeating unique foes; instead it’s mostly just hoping they drop some loot that you can sell to buy more ebony ingots and soul gems so you can make your own armor (and then put a bird on it).
I find the “roleplaying” idea a little shaky when I think about it too much. I mean, if I was an obligate adventurer who regularly had to fight frikkin dragons and my universe conferred to me instant, practical benefits in all aspects of my life by making daggers for a couple hours I’d be on that shit.
Of course, it all really depends on how far you want to segregate gameplay from story – is “levelling up” the way it REALLY works in that universe, or is it an abstraction for the player’s benefit?
Well, you could run away from those badass dragons I suppose.
I discovered last night that I’ve been playing Skyrim with the brightness setting about 25% too low. I’d been assuming Bethesda had wanted a darker, shadowier vibe to Skyrim vs. Oblivion, and was just playing it at stock levels. Since I’m playing a sneaky archer, this seemed…appropriate.
Turning the brightness up three clicks (I’m playing on a 360 connected to a Panasonic plasma) pretty much doubled the visual quality. Objects and landscapes have more depth and detail, colors are more vibrant and lifelike, dungeons are actually visible, and tons of little touches like the nebulae in the starmap and the weather lighting effects are far more pronounced.
One adjustment instantly turned Skyrim from looking “better than Oblivion” to “amazing.”
No shit. In a world with dragons, I’m pretty sure I would stay and home and make the best gear I could before I stood in front of a dragon.
It’s because the developers find it hard to populate dungeons with enemies that are just a good enough challenge for you. The problem with a sandbox game is that you can ideally go anywhere, but the developers have no idea what level you will be, hence the scaling.
In real life, if you decide to take on a elite brigand camp (if that does exists) while at a low level, you die a messy stuff.
The issue about crafting is tricky. In MMO, crafting always get you better items than what you can find as loot in instances (at least, from my experience in LOTR). If not, there’s less incentive to craft.
In Skyrim, if treasure hunting gets you much better loot than crafting + enchanting, players may see no point to it (that’s the whole “what’s fun means what’s the most effective” way of thinking). I think Diablo III system where you can craft in-game items, but without making them better than the original one, a more balanced system (not necessary better, though. D3 is not out yet for comparison anyway).
Another way is to allow enemies to have improved versions of those weapons/armor too, much like how D&D has +1 to +5 modifiers to weapons. This way enemies can have their fun too!
I just leave it as an open option, as it is a single player game.
WoW is mostly the opposite, crafting is vastly inferior to gear from raiding. Some gear is as good, but it usually requires materials you get FROM raiding. There are some exceptions, some of the best in slot gear for various classes is from crafting, which makes it still worthwhile.
However, I think the way to balance it is to say, have your basic weapons and armor and have THOSE be found in dungeons, and then supplementary stuff (i.e. rings, necklaces) will either never be dropped or only dropped unenchanted, so that you have an incentive to craft (it increases your power), but it doesn’t discount killing things.
Yeah, but that doesn’t work in TES games, because it strives for (some) realism and dead enemies drop exactly what they’ve been fighting you with, all of it. If you manage to find and kill a guy decked in all Daedric at level 3, then more power to you, enjoy your suit of Daedric armour, the game balance has officially been broken. In most other CRPGs, enemies do have super weapons or attacks but when you kill them, all they’ve got in their pockets is 5 copper coins. Which is just bullshit, man.
I guess you could circumvent it in TES by making most enemies non-humans, which is kind of what Skyrim does - the really dangerous blokes are bears, giants, dragons or mages who don’t need puny gear to smoke you. And then you find a Draugr in full Ebony around the corner, enchant and smith that, and rock everyone’s faces forever. Whelp.
In a way, I kinda wish they reverted back to Daggerfall’s system where items decayed as you used them and magic items couldn’t be repaired at all. It was immensely irritating because you really, really wanted to keep that uber enchanted dai katana or wear that ridiculously powerful suit of armour ; but couldn’t find it in you to wear them because they only had 100 hits’ worth of existence or something and obviously you’d save it for later, more difficult fights ! And then there were those times when half your gear just poofed deep down a dungeon and you’d scramble to find any crappy replacement lying around until you could hobble back to town.
So, yeah, huge source of pain. But it was good balance, I think.