The amount of charges left in your enchanted weapons is shown (a) when you equip a weapon and (b) when you check your inventory. The ‘charge gauge’ for (a) is the inverse of the ‘charge gauge’ for (b) (i.e, one reads right to left, the other left to right). So I keep thinking, shit, do I have 25% left or 75% left??
Not having both ‘party’s’ items viewable on a single screen during transactions (shopping or storing). So when I come home with a truckload of scavenged books, and I want to keep only the ones I don’t already have, I have to do it pretty much by memory, or take everything out of the drawer, and put them back one-by one. If I could see both what I had and what the drawer had, in a single screen (like in Fallout 3), then it would be so much easier.
I’ve hit some annoying bugs. There was an NPC I was supposed to follow but he got stuck on a set of stairs. I had to repeatedly push-shout him to the top of the stairs where he suddenly remembered what to do and unlocked the door.
I came across a camp full of guards from a particular faction. I’d pissed them off somehow so they immediately attack. But there’s one named unkillable NPC in the group that I can’t talk to or kill. I shout-pushed him off the side of the mountain and carried on.
All the faction guards seem telepathic. If you whack a single one of them all the others in the entire world will attack on sight.
Was this way up in the north? Because the exact same thing happened to me just yesterday! I stumbled into this little encampment of hostiles and slaughtered the lackeys only to find out that their boss would take damage and fall but would not die no matter how many times I hit him with a flaming sword. Since I didn’t want him following me around for the rest of my days I did the same as you and stunned him with a shout and then left.
I’ve also got a glitched quest from a dungeon I raided which had two hagravens in it. One was in a cage and wanted me to kill the other one (Petra). But hagravens are tough and aggressive and I had no reason to trust this one just because she talked to me (I’ve been stabbed in the back by plenty of folks who start off all friendly) so I left the bitch in her cage while I went off to deal with her friend. Turns out that permanently glitches the quest so that it never completes.
I’m also not a fan of how the creatures will respawn in exactly the same place. I had a frost dragon camping over a dungeon I was raiding and he was kicking my ass all over the map. I had no option to run left because there was always a bear waiting for me right around the corner. Running right led to a nice open hillside in which the dragon could devastate me at his convenience. I eventually won by hiding behind a pillar and plinking him with spells. I thought it was a pathetic way to fight a dragon but apparently that’s how you do it.
One time I went into the mountains to kill a dragon for the Bounty. I get in the area and the dragon attacks me. We fight and I kill him but the quest doesn’t update. I figure it is glitched and while I was still in the area, I turn a corner and see a second Blood dragon! This one was the bounty. The first one was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Sounds like the same one. It was sort of near the magic university.
Had another glitch on the main quest -
In the quest where you have to call a dragon, then trap it and talk to it. It had the same clipping problems I’ve seen before and after landing couldn’t walk without being shout-pushed. When it finally got caught in the trap it was somehow standing on my companion. So once we had the conversation and I released him, she started throwing spells at him, he attacked, and the quest couldn’t continue. Had to reload from an earlier save and do it over.
Just bought this last week when I finally saw it at lower price, and while it is a great game I would have preferred it to have the same sort of level/skill system as Fallout 3/NV. The current one leads to all sorts of silliness if you want to level up a particular skill, like me running around 2 Horkers wearing all my mana regen gear and repeatedly casting Bound Swords and then sheathing them because I wanted to get to 65 Conjuring to get the next tier of summons. Or standing in a flame trap and channeling Heal to level up Restoration. Not to mention the smithing/enchanting grind to 100 is painfully similiar to MMO crafting.
For most skills, yes. For things like Conjuring (atronachs summoned before combat do not give skillups, bound weapons are basically useless and do not give skillups for their use, only if you summon them in combat) and Smithing (I’ve made maybe a thousand items, of which I’ve used maybe a dozen, and I’m still not at 100) and Enchanting (same thing as Smithing), not really.
And even if you don’t have to, just because you can do it can easily make it irresistible. No such problem in Fallout 3/NV. YMMV, but for me it’s a definite thing I don’t like, and for a friend of mine it was enough of a dealbreaker he quit the game because of it.
Technically, IIRC, the atronach must enter combat even if you do not. It’s just got to go hostile to something, not even attack, and you progress on your summoning bar. Then again, the best way to grind summoning is to equip soul trap in both hands, find a corpse, and cast it until you reach level 100 in conjuring.
I’ve just discovered that sometimes a quest has to be done in a very specific way and it isn’t always the way I think it should be done. For example:
I just found the Thieves Guild. They assign me a pretty simple task- do some debt collecting for them. I find the first deadbeat and talk to her. She tells me to pound sand. I pound her face instead (with just fists because the Guild guy said not to kill anyone). All of a sudden guards are flooding in and she’s attacking me with a dagger. Alright then bitch, it’s on. I toast her and all her new friends. My bounty goes up by 1000 for each guard I kill. The whole friggin’ city is after me but I make it out the door. My attempts to run are stymied by this lynch mob until finally benevolence prevails and a dragon interrupts the chase. The crowd massacres the dragon in a few seconds flat. I stick around just long enough to grab the dragon soul, toast a few more suckers and then run like hell.
I don’t think I’m welcome in Riften anymore.
The actual solution was to sneak into her place, grab some valuable of hers and threaten to throw it down a well. I thought I was supposed to do the talking with my fists!
I don’t know if that was hyperbole but I’ve made 299 magic items and am at 100 in Enchanting. I probably hit 100 at about 250-260 items since I’ve cranked out a lot of double-enchanted items.
I didn’t really consider it pure grinding though since I was financing all my new spell tomes and home improvements via magic item sales. I sometimes wonder about what’ll become of society in Skyrim with all those +Sneak/+Fortify Burden silver rings floating about.
Aside from that, I haven’t worried too much about skills and, at Level 34, have 99 Destruction, 65 Conjuration, Alteration & Restoration in the 40s, 65 Lockpicking and everything else around the 20s by playing a pure mage type. Well, Alchemy is in the 40s I think… I stopped bothering with it since I’m loaded with looted potions as is.
I do grind some but happy to use trainers instead where I can. I don’t find it at all necessary to get to 100 in anything, although I’m interested to see what the top Sneak perk does.
Speaking of which, I’m playing a stealthy type now and putting perks into Speech. Still sort of wish shopkeepers didn’t buy loot and that I didn’t spend so much time in shop menus (and looking at the loading screens as I enter shops) but I can see that there’s a lot of the game built around selling legit loot and stolen items.
This is probably my last replay, at least for a while. I’ve been eyeing Dark Souls; if I can’t find a deal on that, maybe New Vegas.
Well, the “thousand items” was more for Smithing than Enchanting, yes. Haven’t counted how many items I’ve enchanted but that skill goes up a lot faster than Smithing so it’s maybe 200 … err wait, I guess the in-game statistics would tell me the exact number. In any case, hit 100 smithing and 80 enchanting and decided that that was enough grinding. And despite people disagreeing with me, I still very much prefer the FO3/NV skill system.
I guess I was wrong about conjuring, never saw it go up from a summoned creature so I figured it doesn’t give you skill if you cast it just before the fight as I tended to do.
I’ve found enchanting to be a mega-grind. I don’t know how the hell I’m supposed to build levels because it’s so painful getting soul gems to enchant with. They made it unneccesarily complicated by not only requiring you to capture the souls of your enemy but have the right size sould gem availible to do it. So I’ve got a bunch of empty greater soul gems that aren’t big enough to capture human souls but are too big to waste on critters, and they cost a lot of money.
To add insult to injury there is no way to BUY enchantment recipes of whatever. You have to go find an item that is already enchanted with whatever you desire before you can actually do the enchantment. For those of us that aren’t using guides or whatever that will tell us where to find some armor or weapon with some specific bonus we may never get to enchant things as we would like to.
Exploring a few dwarf ruins had me swimming in soul gems since they drop regularly from the automaton/clockwork thingies. That and the magic vendors sell them.
When I traveled on foot, I would just Soul Trap the native fauna and blast them. A lot of goat, fox and deer souls went into my enchantment training. I only used Greater or Grand souls for gear I wanted so it didn’t bother me much if a petty soul went into a Common stone since they were all being turned into vendor trash anyway.
Once you hit 100 and take the top perk, it becomes sort of ridiculous for money. When a double enchanted Paralyze/Banish iron dagger sells for a couple thousand gold, your biggest issue becomes finding a merchant rich enough to sell them at.
I haven’t played FO:NV so I don’t have an opinion on the leveling system there. Maybe part of why Enchanting didn’t bother me was because I’m playing pure mage so it seemed like the thing to do and powerful enchanted gear held real benefits for me since I’m not wearing armor or swinging a sword. Speaking of, that probably helps explain my surplus soul gems – I almost never have to recharge magic weapons.
The Black Star makes Enchanting a lot easier and I’m not sure if I could have stomached it at all without it (if you don’t like to use wiki/guides don’t click on the link). The grind to get the skill up even with it is still pretty bad for a single player game, I’ve only seen the same sort of thing in MMOs.
Fallout 3 and NV just give xp for killing stuff and for quests, and when you level up you allocate your skill points, no practicing the skill required. I guess using that type of system for Skyrim would make it less of an Elder Scroll game so I can see why they didn’t go that way.
Which brings me to another thing I don’t like about this game: the “whiny bitch” dialog option. All paths generally lead to the same quest (except the “I don’t have time for this” but if you choose to whine about something instead of just going off and doing it, you usually get a disdainful lecture from the NPC about what a whiny bitch your character is. The guy already told me what to do- rough the deadbeats up but don’t kill them. I thought that was a perfectly fine point to start that quest from and I didn’t want to piss off my new acquaintances at the Thieves Guild because I had a feeling they’d be happy to stab me in the back (like ALMOST EVERYONE ELSE in the game). So when I had the choice of “talk more” or “git-r-done” I sheathed my weapons and headed off to do the deed.
It’s all sour grapes anyhow. I don’t like Riften. The guards always want me to walk around to the north gate and the first time I tried that was also the first time I had to face down a dragon all by my lonesome. Screw Riften!
