I just bought filled petty or lesser gems for training. That and hired the trainer at the college. I quit that character long before I got Enchanting to 100, though. I trained by adding stamina damage to weapons. That added a lot to the price of the item and I’m pretty sure it more than covered the cost of the gems.
I didn’t have any trouble finding enchantments I wanted, either, but I was just after common things like fortify magika and fortify destruction. Radiant Raiment in Solitude was a good place to look for magic enhancers and stuff you can add to jewellery.
Smithing was easy to grind, IMO. Made iron daggers and leather bracers, rarely had to buy material.
I thought of a gripe: I find a lot of perks worthless, except maybe as a stepping stone, while others are crazy awesome and maybe easier to get (thinking of that bash perk that slows time here). The entire Lockpicking tree is junk because picks are common and locks aren’t that hard. I skipped half the heavy armor tree by using a particular stone and I didn’t want to spend two perks to get to the one I wanted-- wish I could figure out similar savings. Still, I feel it’s better than Fallout 3, where sometimes there really weren’t any good choices at level up.
The roguelike Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup has a system where different schools level up but does not (not anymore, anyway) require grinding. You just turn off the ones you don’t want to waste experience on. It doesn’t have any perks, exactly, but I guess it could be combined with a perk system.
Regarding perks that are ho hum: in RPGs I like my characters to be fast talkers so I tend to put points into speech skills, unfortunately I burned a few perks in Speech in Skyrim before I realized it was pretty worthless or at the very least better spent elsewhere.
Don’t know if this was mentioned but quest items with weight. Oblivion had your non-droppable quest items weigh zero. Now I’m saddled with things like a 5# dagger that I can’t store or drop. A single item isn’t much but it adds up and I have quite a few items like this.
The didn’t make New Vegas. The made Fallout 3.
And there are quest objects in New Vegas that have weight and you can’t drop. For instance, at the energy weapon store (I forget its name), it’s possible to steal the combat armor from the trunk out front. Hope you really like it, because if you’ve already done the doorman quest then there’s no way to get rid of it. Ever.
Are you using the Steam workshop + a 3rd party mod manager? Skyrim sorts mods by file date, and mod managers adjust load order by altering the dates. Changing a file’s date will trigger a steam workshop file reload.
I think Valve or Bethesda might be working on a fix to this.
And that’s as it should be. Weapon speed is partially determined by weight; having Red Fury’s Sword as zero weight would enable you to swing it around like a dagger.
I find Skyrim’s color palette so brown and lacking in contrast that it literally makes my eyes hurt. I’ve tried, Lord knows I’ve tried, and I just get so tired of the aching dullness of it that I give up.
I have the Nexus mod manager as well as BOSS. I’ve run BOSS a couple of times to optimize load order, but I think I’ve seen the mods getting updated other times than that.
To an earlier question, I have the latest stable version of SKSE installed, and I update each time Steam tells me there’s something new to do, so I don’t know what SKSE is telling me I don’t have the latest version of Skyrim.
Oddly, the SkyUI is (mostly) working. About the only thing that isn’t working is the keyword filter. It’d be nice if SkyUI worked better with my Midas Luggage, but the icons are very useful in spotting things even if you can’t filter by item type. I’ve heard that Steam and SKSE work together better in other games. With luck, they’ll get SKSE set up to be subscribed for Skyrim, too, and that’ll take care of my remaining issues.
I’m playing what I call a “perk pure” character, as in, I only take perks from the same school. Seeing how I’ve already done fighter and mage, I can choose from Alchemy, Light Armor, Lockpicking, Pickpocket, Sneak, and Speech. Speech perks actually look pretty good, especially Merchant, Investor, and Fence. They’re a bit more appealing because I also figure to knock over the Xbox “get 100k gold” accomplishment, for lack of other idleness. I wish there was a “cheese your way through most fights by relying on followers, terrain, or a summoning staff” or a “save constantly” accomplishment, because I’d easily get those. I suck at sneak attacks.
It’s only for some quest items. The 20-lb. keg you have to take to the bartender in tiny village at the foot of the path to High Hrothgar certainly weighs you down. But I gave the Jarl in Markarth his ancestral shield that weighed 14 lbs and he gave me an ebony shield with the same weight and I became encumbered. So obviously that quest shield didn’t count toward weight.
Maybe it’s only weapons and armor that are freebies?
There is a HardcoreSkyrim mod that adds the need to eat, drink, and sleep. I actually seek out food ingredients now so I can make some nutritious cabbage and potato stew. If I’m out travelling it’s actually a relief to find a settlement so I can buy (or “borrow”) some grub. In the inn I use their cooking pot to combine ingredients into more nutritious forms.
There is also a camping mod to let you set up a tent and cook over a campfire.
I’ve been playing for ~50 hours; I’m at level 23, I think.
It seems like there aren’t really any choices in this game. You customize your character to the extent that you choose how he/she kills things, but the quests and the dialogue “trees” are so linear. In the Fallout games, you had to make significant moral decisions that had major impact on the trajectory of the game, you could double-cross quest-givers, what factions you sided with mattered, what kind of reputation you had with each faction mattered, there was such a thing as reputation and alignment so your choices stacked… You get the idea.
I feel like the only real choice I have in this game is the order in which I do the quests. The outcomes of the quests are already a given.
Also, you don’t get to develop real relationships with any of the characters. Your followers can’t have meaningful conversations with you and are just packmules, your spouse is just a means for you to earn more money and get a perk for sleeping next to, they’re not distinct at all. The game doesn’t give me reason to care about anybody I help out via a quest. They’re all nobodys. One thing Dragon Age got right was giving all of your companions vibrant personalities – there were certain characters I took with me in my party just because I liked hearing their banter with each other in that particular combination of characters. Skyrim is quite shallow in comparison.
The Northern Lights at night sure are pretty, though.
Also (taking a break from playing) – it drives me crazy that the quests in the Miscellaneous category don’t give you clues to their locations. I have a lot of “return X to Y” but there’s no hint as to where Y may be. The “show on map” function works sporadically if at all.