Did you update your BTmod? There was a bug in one version that was causing loot lag.
I have a question for those of you who have by now gained significant experience playing Oblivion. This will be my first TES game, so I’m not familiar with the levelling system of Morrowind nor Oblivion.
Now that my game is on hold for a few weeks, I’m giving extra thought to creating my new character. I’m finding the whole business of character creation/optimization/levelling pretty daunting. I’d like to be able to role-play the game with an eye to wise decisions, but I don’t want the focus of my playing experience to be upon strategies to get the most oomph from the skill levelling system. I’m referring to all the threads on TES forums about reversing character’s major vs. minor skills; sequence of skill levelling; multipliers, etc, and threads complaining that several levels into a character, people realize that it’s permanently gimped due to their lack of attention to character optimization, and so they “have to” abandon the char and start over. Same for mage characters: unplayable for the long haul, some say.
If I start the game without having learned or optimized every nook and cranny of the attribute/skill/levelling system, can my character continue to evolve over a long period of time as I get the hang of things, my interests change, and I want to try some new skills? I’d like to have a character (or a couple) that I can play for many months, open-endedly, but not without direction.
Hell, what if I want to play a female, or less than optimal class? The stats may not be as desirable, but could it still be fun for the long haul? Or doomed to endless chores and hassles? The Oblivion guide says play for fun, but the vocal posters say no. What has been your experience in this?
Haven’t installed that mod.
Speaking of mods, though, let’s discuss.
I’m impressed that a week after release there are 100+ mods. Most of them are pretty shallow tweaks, but lots are useful.
I’m using:
Health spell cost mod. Halfs the mana spells for healing. The game’s default healing spells seem to be a bad bang for the buck. I’m trying out a battlemage character that has to rely on his heal spell to heal, and sometimes I have to sit there for 3 minutes waiting for mana regen to heal myself. This mod seems to make it more reasonable.
More arrows recovered. Simply ups the arrow recovery rate from corpses from 50% to 75%.
Better water. Definitely a cool mod. Not as realistically murkey for river and pond water - looks more like the carribean ocean. But it’s much prettier.
Deadlier sneaking. Just installed this, haven’t played with it yet. Basically ups the amount of damage bonus on a sneak attack concurrent with sneak skill. Makes playing an assassin more practical… I find myself having to use a shield and fight like a light melee fighter when that wasn’t really my original intent. This mod will probably make the game play more like I intended from the start.
DEJ_Harvest. Awesome mod. When you pick ingredients/flowers, they dissapear until they come back 3 days later. The actual 3d model dissapears. That way it’s much much easier to pick a bunch out of a group, instead of trying to move your mouse around to the right pixel while spamming space bar. Highly recommended.
Alchemy potion perks - number of potions you can use at once scales with your alchemy skill.
Fortify Skill spell: you can create spells and enchantments that fortify skills and not just attributes.
Increased bow damage. Just installed, haven’t played with it yet. Probably will make playing a ranged character more practical.
More Sky Climates Mod. Haven’t experienced much of it yet, but the screen shots looked pretty. Adds lots of different types of skies.
Kobu’s stamina mod: just replaces the word “fatigue” with “stamina” everywhere. Makes more sense.
And I’m thinking of trying this one out: NoObsoleteEnemies and NoObsoleteLoot. Instead of having lower level mobs dissapear completely as you level, this gives a random (weighted, I assume) chance that a lower level mob will show up where normally one your level would. Adds more variety, I think. With my main character at level 30+, I don’t see anything but the highest mob of each class. The loot mod makes more bandits wear steel, etc. instead of having them always decked out in daedric and glass gear at high levels.
Anyone have anything to recommend? How about one of those levelling mods? Thinking of trying one for a new character.
General tip: Never take alchemy as a primary skill. It just levels up way too fast. You’ll go through level 1-15 with half your level up points coming from alchemy, which means you’re going too fast and not getting good stat bonuses. Even as a secondary skill, it advances very fast.
My best character in Morrowind began his life as a completely inept dunce, by design. At the end he was a spectacular orc who was capable of playing as either a pure mage, pure fighter or pure priest. But things have changed with Oblivion…they’ve gimped the enchanting system, taken out levitation, and generally made it far more difficult for less than optimal characters to survive.
I’m expecting a mod with a return to the better parts of the Morrowind rules any day now. But for the moment, I’m playing optimized characters like a battlemage (crouch behind shield, cast destruction on-touch spells) and a mage/marksman. They’re cheesy and kinda boring, nothing compared to my old orc rolling around in the mud trying to punch a mudcrab to death, but it’ll be awhile before modding can tame Oblivion.
:smack: Thanks.
Has anyone else noticed that the staff of the Anvil Fighter’s Guild changes out of armor and into jammies before going to bed at night? Because I think that’s one of the most awesome things I’ve seen in a videogame.
I would completely ignore the idea of customizing or optimizing your set of skills for your first character. Seriously. Don’t let it bother you. The way I figure it, what’s the point in trying to tune a car you’ve never started?
I am playing the pre-packaged classes. I figure, somebody who knows more than me designed them to be functional. What do I know? Who am I, who have never played the game, to guess what’s best?
Don’t listen to the forum people. Some say mages are gimped and unplayable. Some say the magic is too powerful and overbalanced. Wait five minutes and they’ll change their minds. (I just began to post on elderscrolls.com as Confishus.)
Just pick a race and class (and gender) that looks fun and start off with it. Bear in mind that any character class can do anything. All classes have all skills. They just have their majors at 25 and their minors at 5 (plus racial bonuses). If at any time you want to pick up one of those minor skills to supplement what you’re doing, hop on it. It’ll take some work, but by gum, you can work it up until it’s at a useful level. Won’t take long.
The only thing you can’t change over the long life of a character is what it takes to level up. Going up from level 1 to level 2 means your major skills have to skillup by 10 points total. (That is, 10 times in any distribution among 7 skills. Not every skill must improve. Not available in Arkansas.)
You can even level up by doing 1 major skill 10 times in a row. There might even be a major skill that you never skill-up in because it’s so boring you hate doing it. Or because you forgot your mace in your other pants. Or because your dog ate your alembic. Whatever.
I have made about half-and-half female to male toons. Of course, with several toons, I haven’t got far, but there’s not a marked difference to me. Maybe mathematically I don’t have the greatest advantage with certain builds, technically, that I could officially have, but so what? It’s still fun.
Definitely, definitely play for fun. You won’t notice the numbers if you don’t want to notice them.
As I said before in the thread, I made a list of 20 characters to build, using 20 of the pre-made classes, one of each of the 10 races, of both genders. They’re not all built, but they’ve got names and plans. 
I’ll repeat my offer to post those 20 combinations if you wanted to see what I was doing with my peoples.
As far as gimpiness and such - use the difficulty slider in the gameplay options. Set it to something that you find challenging. Even if the character you create is weak, you can make the enemies a bit weaker and still keep it a fair fight. Definitely don’t compromise on the type of character you want to play in order to try to be efficient.
Does anyone know what aspects of gameplay the difficulty slider changes?
For what its worth, I made my character look as much as possible like Susanna Clarke, the author of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.
The gameplay slider only seems to affect combat. I think it may lower/raise the levels of the autogenerated enemies so that they have more or less HP, do more or less damage, and you do more or less damage to them.
Be careful, though - I’ve noticed even a small change in the slider position is enough to substantially effect the difficulty.
Correction. I think the gameplay slider affects a lot. I turned mine up, not too far but a decent notch, and those oblivion casters are summoning daedroth and silencing me now, which I can’t recall them every doing before.
Also, the obsolete monsters mod is pretty cool so far. Because I’m level 33 (yes, I have no life at the moment) the only mobs I see are the top end ones scaled with me. I always see storm atronachs, never flame or frost, because they’re the highest monster of that type, and once you get above a certain level you’ll only see the highest creature that scales with you. The no obsolete monster mod changes that, you’ll see random opponents. Now I see flame and frost atronachs. The problem is that they don’t scale, only the top end monsters do… so if I see a clanfear, he’s going to be stuck at level 12, which means I can one shot him. Still, I think I like it, if only for the variety in opponents.
Adding that, plus deadlier sneaking, plus better bows, though, made me entirely too powerful. I will probably turn off the latter two - since the no obsolete mod gives me a mix of opponents, I’ll kick some ass, and have hard fights, pretty much at random… it’ll make my character not feel evenly matched with every single monster I take on without having to modify bow/sneak damage.
:eek: You’ve got to get that one!
Out of your list, I have Better Water, Deadlier Sneaking, and Alchemy potions perks.
I need to get this one.
I use Seikema’s slower leveling mod. Takes twice as long to raise a level.
My list (excluding those above):
Darker dungeons (my dungeons were light enough I never needed to use a torch)
Darker nights (ditto above)
Arcane velocity (makes destruction spells faster, for everyone)
Guild ownership (gives you a chest in the guild houses to store your stuff, and makes some guild stuff so you have to steal it instead of getting it free, based on your level in the guild.)
Khajiit night eye (lets you toggle the night eyes spell instead of casting it every few seconds)
Detect hostility (a group of spells that can tell you if someone is hostile)
Marksman velocity (like arcane velocity)
No more annoying messages (removes “loading area” and such messages)
No psychic guards (not sure if this one works)
tags Natural Wildlife (some creatures attack; others don’t)
WinterborneTE’s Wilderness Creatures mod (adds more variety to the creature spawn lists in the wild; you can get things like bears at low levels and packs of wolves, for example)
I haven’t yet installed the loot leveling mod. I’m waiting until all the bugs are worked out, and I’m only level 5 now, so I have a bit of time.
I’d be interested to see if anyone manages to finish the game by “just playing.” The difficulty scales with your level, whether you’re optimizing your advancement or not. The system as designed punishes a lack of metagame thinking more than any other CRPG system I’ve ever seen. Mind you, the game of optimizing your character is a fun an interesting game, and just running around doing your thing is also fun and interesting, but unfortunately you can’t do both. Not easily, anyway. At least in Morrowind you could relax because you knew when you started getting real money coming in you could just train any skill and be in control of your advancement then. So, the opportunity cost of not pumping up the benefit of each level was much lower. Now you can only train up to 5 points per level, which precludes buying a level, and also precludes just buying up minor skills late in the game, since you can only do it during times in the game when you’re leveling.
The lack of levitation is kind of a shame, because one of the thrills in Morrowind was the ability to fly through the panorama.
I finished the game by more or less “just playing.” I did not do any kind of “optomization” of my advancement. In the end I had 2 major skills that were more or less useless (destruction and alteration) because of my low INT, and it’s fair to say that I wasted a lot of points on personality that I shouldn’t have. As for difficulty, there were a few hours there when I was having a really hard time against Daedroth and the like, but for the majority of the 2nd half of the game I was more or less unstoppable, reloading more due to crashes than to deaths.
It would have been interesting if there had been Morrowind-like stat limitations on faction advancement this time around. It did kind of bug me that my more-or-less pure fighter could advance through the mage guild with ease.
[nitpick]Destruction is Willpower based[/nitpick]
Bethesda is in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t place. You could so far outlevel all the content in Morrowind; my archer-thief could take out all those golden armor goons in melee by the last third of the game.
Now, in Oblivion, the guards will always be major badasses, no matter what level you become (I disliked that about Baldur’s Gate II also). Sometimes, you want to go out there and show that you are, officially, a BMF. Next game hopefully captures both aspects.
But mana is Intel based.
Definitely agree with you on the first point. They should not have nerfed the training system, what a drag.
On the second point though, it seems that they would have had to institute a Morrowind/Tribunal system where levitation could work in most of Cyradil but not in Oblivion. After all, if you could just levitate up to a sigil stone…
As is Alteration. But, as pointed out by FinnAgain, mana is based on INT. Even medium-level spells were far, far too MP intensive for me to be able to cast.
I dunno… is this really a huge problem? I think it’s largely dependent on how combat-focused your character is. While I had some hard times in the middle of the game, especially when I first broke into a new band of scaling, by the end I was still a total badass. At lvl 31, my character can cut down a guard or two almost immediately, despite their level.
Well, there it is. We’ve got at least one success story for “just playing” as a spellcaster. I’m thinking a straight fighter would also be likely to produce results. I don’t know about a thief-type, though.
I was looking at one of the leveling mods mentioned. Looks like it would be a lot better for allowing you to relax and just play, except that I think setting your hitpoints a ENDx6 is a bit high. You’d start off with at least 180 and would likely end up with hit points a good deal higher than my maxed out Morrowing characters ever had.
There are mods that change this. The game is very moddable, which is nice. I feel bad for the console players.
The no obsolete monsters mod gives you a taste of this. You’ll face random enemies. Only the high end enemies in each type of enemy scales - so if you face a clannfear, for instance, which doesn’t scale, it’s always going to be level 12.
I’m level 34… so when I do an oblivion gate, I’ll have xavalais at level 32-35 that are a tough fight, but also see clanfears and stuff that I can just wail on.