I re-rolled my fighter to be an argonian who will only wear leather type or hide type armors, and always dual wields swords (not daggers, swords). I think that sticking to this type of “quasi RPing” might increase the challenge quite a bit. I’m also making him a magic hater, so no magic to help out tough fights. Although, he will be willing to have a mage help him, so Marcurio may be hearing from him soon. 
Here’s my justification for my playstyle, which is pretty much just wandering around everywhere doing everything with my over-powered, soul-harvesting, health-sucking, hyper-smithed daedric bow that takes a whole bunch of things down with one sneaking shot, and letting Lydia do most of the messy work: I don’t use my shouts very much at all, so I consider my bow as my proxy Dragonborn power.
I do admit that I am interested in playing a more strictly self-imposed limitation sort of character next time.
So is the UberBow the only UberItem that you have? Are you using regular armor elsewhere or are you fully Uber’d out? Cuz I totally rolled my mage that way. Gave her a Daedric dagger that leeched mana with each hit and was smithed for maximum damage. Everything else was just stuff I picked up in loot. I like to play my characters as having one particular unique item of power which won’t fully ruin the game but still makes them have that ace in the hole ya know? Like Perseus’s boots or Bilbo’s Sting. And then I make up a fake story about how they got it, and how the character views the item, and I get way too involved don’t I? 
I’m surprised that pure thieves can be overpowered, given that archery and one-handed, let alone magic, belong to other schools. From what I’ve seen thieves are great at picking off or picking at enemies, provided cover or darkness. How do you handle dragons or trolls with a pure thief?
I’ve only played fighters thus far, and ways to increase challenge that come to mind include racial picks. Redguards, Nords, and Orcs all rock as fighters-- I haven’t played a Nord but I can see how 50% cold resist would help a lot, as blizzard and ice spikes are the spells I hate the most as a fighter. So simply taking an elf or whatever would have an impact.
Blocking’s powerful, particularly bash. Smithing is too, especially combined with high skill in armor.
I think echo6160’s light armor/dual wield Argonian might be an interesting challenge build.
Another interesting fighter build I’ve seen described is an unarmed/heavy armor Khajiit. You could combine this with enchanting, add “+ to unarmed” to your armor and end up pretty powerful.
A hybrid build I think might be viable but hard to get going would dual or two handed/alteration. You could make it easier by going one-handed and adding a shield. No race starts with an alteration spell, so you’re going to want to get Oakflesh and Candlelight ASAP and train alteration to get to the mage armor perk and some decent armor spells.
I’m curious to try out a dark elf vampire illusionist with a lot of stealth but I don’t think it would it would be underpowered, more likely the other way.
I found a discussion about “extreme pure builds”. When I was talking about pure builds earlier I meant, for example, your fighter can’t take perks in enchanting or alchemy. This person means you can only actively level skills in your group-- a fighter couldn’t sneak at all or buy or sell as buying and selling gives speechcraft experience. Thieves would be limited to scrolls and unarmed for damage. I guess you could also get the pickpocket perk to plant poisons, Peter Piper.
http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/615804-/61357160
Actually, it sounds feasible with a fighter, you’d just replace your big pile of potions with a bigger pile of food you hunted and gathered. No idea on the others.
Honestly, I’m getting enough challenge as it is on expert with a straight fighter. I’m starting to pick up more resistances, though, plus the elemental protection perk, so maybe I’ll need to turn it up to master. Frequently I find that the main questline is a big cakewalk and that the side quests are where the challenge is.
30x critical back stabs will kill everything except the most powerful enemies. My thief never fought any dragons, but he did one shot a few dwarven centurions and trolls can be easily killed with some fire enchanted weapons or scrolls. Dragons would be a lot harder I imagine but with a few potions and maybe some powerful poisons you could probably deal with them without much difficulty.
I just recently started playing Skyrim on 360, have my orc to level 38 or 39 but I was curious about patches. How often are they released? Currently there are 3 bugs that quite annoy me: no weapon racks work on my houses, I have 4 or 5 quest items stuck in my inventory from quests long completed, and Carlota is stuck behind a wall or cabinet in my house in Whiterun. Having her daughter stand outside the door 24/7 is a bit creepy.
There’s a beta out right now, patch soon but I don’t know if it fixes any of those. If you were on PC I could tell you how to fix them. But:
- Racks don’t work how? Things fall out? In multiple houses?
- Quest items don’t have weight thankfully. They’re just annoying because they’re clutter.
- Don’t know if you can fix this. You can try to FusRoDa her out, or maybe if you can attack her/cast fear on her to make he flee out? Things like that.
I have a Daedric dagger that I never use, and the Razor. Every once in a while I sneak up and do stealth kills with them instead of the bow. I am wearing Dragonscale with various enhancements such as archery bonuses, a health boost, more carrying capacity. For as much as I’ve used bows at Level 52, I’m still only at 87 for archery. I rarely get hit so my Light Armor rating is still really low. I can still get taken down fairly quickly if someone gets close enough with a mace, they just usually don’t get close enough. I’ve been putting way more leveling bonuses on Stamina and Magica than on Health too.
I think I’m still a fairly fragile flower, they just rarely see me coming, even with Lydia clomping around.
- I can’t “activate” them, so I can’t place anything on them. I tried placing a sword in one by hand but gave up after 5 minutes of trying to turn the sword tip side down.
- Oh cool, I hadn’t noticed that.
- FusRoDa? I can’t target her since I can’t see her, is there a spell that would freak anybody in the area but not get me in hot water with the guards? Now that I think of it, she might even be under the house. I only know she’s there cause if I knock something over, she’ll tell me to watch it. Oh, and the aforementioned daughter standing by my door all the time.
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And you’re sure they’re racks, and not just background? In Breezehome/Whiterun, there is only one rack, to the right of the front door. To place things in them, you put a weapon in your right/main hand, then “use” it. I’m not sure of the 360 equivalents, but on PC that’s: put in your left click hand, the push “E” on the rack.
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I meant Unrelenting Force. I think that pushes through doors, not sure about walls. Do you have Detect Life or Aura Whisper to see exactly where she is? A scroll would work.
And some of my suggestions might piss off the guards, but a small assault fine might be worth it. Dump all your equipment in a chest if you’re worried about getting stuff confiscated.
ETA: and obviously, SAVE first before any of that.
On the 360, it’s a common bug. Sometimes reentering the house fixes it, sometimes buying a whole new house will, and sometimes you’re just stuck with it. The only semi-reliable fix I’ve found is reverting back to a save game from before you bought any furniture upgrades, but that’s a lot of potential playing wasted.
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I’ve tried both in Whiterun and in Windhelm. I’ll play around some more, see if there’s something basic I’m missing.
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I might try the shout just for fun. My orc is pretty much a pure one handed warrior so he has little in the way of spells, but I do have a stack of scrolls in a drawer somewhere. I’m a bit of a hoarder so I have stacks of scrolls and potions that I never use. I’ll try it when I get home tonight, thanks!
In the Breezehome (PC Version) Mansion, there is also a single weapon display board in the loft (the wall to the right as you reach the top of the stairs), and one above the front door. There is a shield display board above the master bed. (This is assuming you bought the home upgrades.)
Question: I noticed that the Scimitars I picked up off the Redguard assasins have nice base damage (handy for folks at low level), but they’re not worth much to merchants.
Is this because true Nords won’t buy curved swords? Curved? Swords?
When enchanting them, do their low GP value effect what you can place on them with enchanting?
Oh yeah. They’re not “racks” but forgot about those.
Turn werewolf out of sight, then go near her and howl? That panics anyone nearby, and while it technically freaks out the guards they won’t blame you, they’ll blame the werewolf. You just need to get out of the city and out of sight before changing back. Works for assassinations too; I mainly use werewolf form to assassinate people around witnesses without getting a bounty.
Dunno, but I tried to upgrade some silver weaponry thinking it would come in handy against undead and didn’t see the option to do so.
I have only one major complaint about the game so far. And that is the PS3 (although I guess every platform has the same issue) inventory hierarchy system. It’s fucking annoying to be swapping some things to and from storage when the item(s) keep shifting position in the list.
Say you’ve got:
Gold ring
Gold and emerald ring (10)
Gold and diamond ring (8)
and you start deleting from the stack of (10) that stack is going to move itself around the list in a (seemingly) random way which makes it very difficult to keep track of when you have a lot of inventory. I guess that the software is not moving the items randomly but is instead following some kind of rule, eg. alphabetically, numerically etc etc, but it’s not helpful for the average user. Grrr.
On the PC, at least, there’s an additional annoyance, as the game often can’t tell if you want to use the mouse cursor to make a menu selection, or the keyboard. Sometimes scrolling down a menu with the mouse changes the highlight, sometimes it stays where it was - so you click on item 5 on the menu, but item 2 is still selected, and you use that instead.
Seems to happen the most with books, where it at least has the advantage of being harmless. Still annoying, though, especially when you’re trying to sort through half a dozen identical look “Bounty Notices” to find which one is still active. “No, godammit, I just read that one! Don’t open it again!”
There’s also the problem of keys having different effects in different menus, or even different parts of the same menu. If I’m trying to take alchemy ingredients out of a chest in my home, for example. To take stuff out of the chest, you press E. To put stuff into the chest, you press R. If you press E while trying to put an ingredient into the chest, you consume it. If you press R while trying to take an ingredient out of the chest, you take everything out of the chest.
This is stupid. Bethesda has grown into a formidable game company, but their interfaces are just fucking* awful.*
Ah yes, I wanted to comment on that too, but forgot! I’ve trained myself to be extra careful now, but at the beginning there were numerous occasions where I accidentally took everything from my ingredients cupboard and had to spend the next 10 minutes selectively putting stuff back. :mad: