So we have a huge general discussion thread (http://www.thecbg.org/index.php/topic,127254.0.html) going already.
This thread is for discussing how you've developed your characters, which perks you've chosen, and what you found was the most (or least) fun. Ideas can be as general or specific as desired.
So I mentioned in the other thread I'm playing an archer assassin.
So far most of my perks are in Archery and several in Sneak. I've also got a few in Light Armor and Enchanting.
I've picked up Steel Smithing as a pre-req for Arcane Smithing, which sounds excellent.
I'm debating whether the perks for Illusion are worthwhile. Anyone used these? I have been using Destruction, Restoration, and Alteration intermittently, but I probably won't spend perks on them.
Any great ideas I'm missing out on?
Tok Gro'Mar, my Orc, has focused principally on Light Armor and Two-Handed Weapons. I do quite a bit of damage with 2 handed swords and, if all 4 of my armor slots (Head, body, hands, feet) are filled with light armor, I get a big bonus to my Armor thanks to a cool perk in the Light Armor tree.
Myndan of Tel Vos, my Dunmer, has focused on Destruction and Conjuration with a bit into Restoration and one handed. There's a cool perk in the Conjuration tree that allows your bound weapons to capture souls. There's a perk in the Destruction Tree that allows you, if you two-hand the same spell, do a bunch more damage. I can reign down fireballs from above and ensure my enemies never even get close... Unless there's a lot of them and I run out of mana... Which his one reason why I picked up a perk in the restoration tree that increases my magicka regeneration by 25%!
Have yet to try the game, but I'm considering building a redguard battlemage-ish character with heavy armor and one-handed and whatever magic seems to be the most fun.
My alt would be an altmer mage specializing in illusion and alteration just so I could mess with my enemies and bend them to my will! Sounds fun anyway.
My friend plays a Illusion/Destruction mage and owns absolutely everything with no trouble.
Phoenix, Illusion kicks ass, IMO. Sneak is good to have with it too so you can become silent and invisible right in front of an opponent and buy some time to escape and heal, if things should go wrong. But Destruction already beats the crap out of pretty much anything. It's overpowered, IMO.
My character (a Dunmer) is One-Handed and Destruction Magic. I've picked up a few misc. perks in Light Armor (for the additional protection, but not much else) and I'm delving into Blacksmithing and Enchanting as well so I can eventually make my own gear that'll beat the crap out of the random junk I find in the world (most of which I sell or disenchant anyway because the stuff I'm wearing, and have been wearing for most of the game, is just Better than the stuff I'm finding now).
I Just picked up a perk in One-Handed that has cemented me into using Axes. It allows me to tack a Bleeding condition onto enemies I hit with axes. I am of the opinion that you can NEVER get enough damage to the guys/things trying to kill you, so this perk makes me very happy.
My Lizard-Person Who's Race Name I Can Never Spell But Is Probably Shorter Than Typing This is mainly Destruction with a bit of Restoration and Conjuration thrown in (Enough to get the Resto Dual-Cast boost and mana regen, and the conjuration for boosting my elemental summons because those are vital, as well as my conjured weapons.) I've finally spent some parks in Blacksmithing and Enchanting because I found an infinite money loop using the soul drain of my conjured swords - go, fill a bunch of lesser and petty soul gems, head to town, buy a bunch of iron ore/ingots and leather, craft iron daggers, enchant, resell, repeat. Always come out ahead cost-wise. :P
I also have one perk in one-handed for the damage boost, and I'm putting enough points in speech to get the perk where I can sell to any merchant, because that's huge.
I haven't got anything that can run Skyrim but I've been playing it when round at my friend's house and I've got a heavy armour/two handed Orc who absolutely wrecks most enemies. Very simple build, but very very fun :)
I wanted to like illusion a lot. But the only spell in it making me real excited it Invisibility.
Actually I just started a Destruction mage. I had been impressed with how good it seemed just using it a little. But when I pulled out a Blizzard scroll with my thief to soften up a horde of undead and it killed them all, I was floored.
Where might I obtain this invisibility spell? Fear looks good too.
Argonian with stealth, enchantment, alchemy, archery all good. A little destruction in there too. I've got soul draining melee weapons and a frost ancient nord bow. And now an elven shield with some pretty heavy fire resistance for slaying dragons. Haven't even got a house.
I catch all the butterflies. I f***ing love butterflies.
Quote from: beejazz
Where might I obtain this invisibility spell? Fear looks good too.
You have to have high enough skill to cast a spell before the vendors sell it. I think that one gets sold by the wizard in Whiterun.
Quote from: PhoenixI think that one gets sold by the wizard in Whiterun.
I
hate that guy! He'll never sell me a spell at a reasonable price and he'll never buy a spell from me for a decent return (especially problematic if I accidentally purchase a spell I didn't want).
I have gone into whiterun at night, quicksaved, and killed this guy before reloading the game to quicksave about 5 times now. It's very, very cathartic to dual Impact Chain Lightning him as he runs out of the room and his carcass is sent flying across the main hall with no reprecussion.
Also, I found something interesting. I started a sneaky shooty wood elf that's going to have some conjuration magic (basically, as soon as crap hits the fan, she summons something and then runs away to resume shooting from a distance or just runs away.) While levelling up my archery in the first town, I decided to pick the pockets of the trainer. With a few perks in pickpocket, some cheating use of quicksave for the rare times he did notice, I'm now level 12, have a 50 archery and 64 pickpocket, 25 speech, and haven't done a single quest yet except the immediate "Get away from the bad situation at the beginning" quests. I think this is a bit cheap, but also a bit awesome. :P
Quote from: Xathan Of Many Worlds
I have gone into whiterun at night, quicksaved, and killed this guy before reloading the game to quicksave about 5 times now. It's very, very cathartic to dual Impact Chain Lightning him as he runs out of the room and his carcass is sent flying across the main hall with no reprecussion.
Also, I found something interesting. I started a sneaky shooty wood elf that's going to have some conjuration magic (basically, as soon as crap hits the fan, she summons something and then runs away to resume shooting from a distance or just runs away.) While levelling up my archery in the first town, I decided to pick the pockets of the trainer. With a few perks in pickpocket, some cheating use of quicksave for the rare times he did notice, I'm now level 12, have a 50 archery and 64 pickpocket, 25 speech, and haven't done a single quest yet except the immediate "Get away from the bad situation at the beginning" quests. I think this is a bit cheap, but also a bit awesome. :P
You are a bad man.
Quote from: Xathan Of Many Worlds
Also, I found something interesting. I started a sneaky shooty wood elf that's going to have some conjuration magic (basically, as soon as crap hits the fan, she summons something and then runs away to resume shooting from a distance or just runs away.) While levelling up my archery in the first town, I decided to pick the pockets of the trainer. With a few perks in pickpocket, some cheating use of quicksave for the rare times he did notice, I'm now level 12, have a 50 archery and 64 pickpocket, 25 speech, and haven't done a single quest yet except the immediate "Get away from the bad situation at the beginning" quests. I think this is a bit cheap, but also a bit awesome. :P
Actually, if you do his mini quest and get him as a follower, you can take back the gold you pay him by choosing to trade with him--no pickpocketing needed.
@SabrWolf:
I didn't know people sold the same spell at different prices. So it's worth it to shop around, then?
But if I don't pickpocket, I don't get to level up my pick pocketing....or be a bad bad man. :P
@Phoenix - I've never actually found another person who sells spells at all. I just don't like getting ripped off by an NPC who's a stuck up jerk. lol
Quote from: SabrWolf
@Phoenix - I've never actually found another person who sells spells at all. I just don't like getting ripped off by an NPC who's a stuck up jerk. lol
I think every Jarl has a court wizard. At least at the hold's I've visited they do. Also there's the College at Winterhold, where most members sell a single school. But I thought the price you sell/buy at is entirely determined by your Speech skill and Speech perks, not the NPC (with the exception of their gender if you have the Allure perk).
Yeah, he's kind of full of himself. But most of the wizards seem to be. Wait until you get to the college.
@Xathan,
True. Of course, you could be pickpocketing other people and actually making money, rather than stealing back your own money.
And it is a way to get the money back from other trainers that don't become followers.
My first character is Mezerous, a level 29 dark elf vampire with high One-Handed, Sneak, Archery, Light Armor, Conjuration and Restoration skills (the first four are in the 60's/70's, the others high 40's). I recently found out that the reason why everything was two-shotting me at this level was because my game had somehow had the difficulty increased to Master, so I really should've been absolutely conquering everything I've come across... all of which I have now that I've fixed the difficulty, except for a jerk named Malyn. I spend a lot of time sneaking, taking advantage of the backstab bonuses from the Sneak tree. Being a vampire adds an extra dimension to the game; where I've only got a few days at a time where I can interact with people normally before I reach STAGE FOUR WORLD EATER VAMPIRE, I have to plan out my questing very carefully and pick appropriate locations and intermissions where I can feed.
My second character is a sword-and-board Nord lawful neutral-ish character named Jorn who quickly joined the legion. I've played him for about 6 hours and he's already level 15. The heavy armor, one-handed weapons, big shield combo in this game rocks, which I am very happy about.
My first character in Skyrim was a Nord named Heimdal. He's based off the first character I ever made in Morrowind. That character was, of course, named for the Norse god.
From the start I knew I wanted my main weapon to be an axe and I wanted to take advantage of the Skyrim ability to equip a different thing to each hand. To round out the feel, I favored the idea of heavy armor to put emphasis on the nordvikingdwarfiness and destruction so he could go all wrath of god on his foes.
Early on, I toyed with mixing things up a bit and tried out some two handed and some block. I even used some light armor because that's what was more readily available and cheaper. It was obvious right away that fire in one hand and an axe in the other is pretty much unstoppable at low levels. I stuck with that tactic for a long time. I always carried a bow, just in case, and even dropped a perk or two into archery.
Pretty quickly I fell into the same thing I did with WoW -- Spending most of my time crafting. Alchemy and Enchinting ate a couple of perks but smithing was my bigger focus. I got that to 100 before anything else and got all the perks for it. A lot of my perks went into heavy armor and a few into one handed. Destruction got a couple to make flames cheaper and more powerful. Speech also got a few perks so I could sell anything to anyone and do it at a better price. After leveling up, I found myself using flames less and less. My second hand more often used soul trap or healing or a light spell.
I've stopped playing this character for now. Eventually, I may go back to them and take up two weapon fighting.
I'm loving enchanting. I've crafted flawless elven armor and enchanted it to reduce the cost of destruction spells to almost nothing. I plan to craft heavy armor with high resist magic and give it to a follower--I had to dismiss my followers because I kept blowing them up. But if I give them enough resist magic and resist fire, maybe they'll be more worthwhile.
It is nice to have someone go front-line with the enemies. And to deal with other mages, ug.
Ok, well, maxing Enchanting and Smithing is ridiculous. Takes a long time, but a full suit of dragonscale gives insane armor, and max enchanting allows me to reduce the magicka cost on Destruction and Restoration to 0. Which is kind of sad, almost.
I actually managed to stun-lock a dragon that landed next to me (with dual cast fireball). Kind felt guilty about abusing the poor guy like that. But it is cathartic.
Dual wielding bound blades is fun, too.
Daedra armor provides a higher armor rating than Dragon Plate, if you're looking to optimize. I'm glad they went that way since it seems so much harder to get that many Daedra Hearts than Dragon Bones.
I didn't think that Smithing took too terribly long to max. I have yet to get Enchanting all the way up there. Combining the two should be epic.
It's unfortunate that resistances are currently broken.
Actually, I managed to max enchanting and smithing very quick, and come out ahead financially by about 10,000 septims. Here's how I did it:
A) get married ASAP to a merchant and move into their house (I recommend yslonda in whiterun).
B) get to the college of winter hold.
C) find a weapon with either the absorb life or turn undead enchantment and de it.
D) buy two petty soulgems (full)
E) buy all the iron you can afford and an equal number of leather straps.
F) mass produce iron daggers.
G) enchant two daggers with the above enchantments. Sell. Use that money to buy more petty soul gems (should be able to afford at least 2 more)
Repeat e-g, hitting up the college vendors, general merchants, and your spouse for gems - one smith should provide enough iron. If they run out of goods or cash, sleep for 48 hours (lovers comfort helps levelling faster) so they resupply. It took me a month and a half skryim time but maybe 10 total hours IRL time, some of which i spent dragon hunting/questing, and now have max in both of those skills.
Also, if you want the best deal cost-wise, max out speech first: go to black briar meadery in riften once speech hits 25 (theres a begger you can give a Coin to to get a Blessing of 15 speech in riften) There's a dude there. Ask him what he thinks of working for the black briars, then persuade him to tell you the truth. Grab a book for one hand and keep tapping enter with the other and repeat the persuade unil at 100 speech. (I got sick of how slow my speech was leveling - was level 43 with a 42 speech.)
I still want to play Skyrim (will probably get a chance to try it today, yay!), but damn, spending 10 hours just maxing out a skill sounds dull...
I'm honestly not too keen on getting into enchanting and/or smithing. Seems to involve either pretty standard issue numerical buffs which I can't really get excited about or mass production.
You introduce crafting to any game and you end up with that grind that MMO games are famous for. Just try playing Monster Hunter. It entertains me, though.
Just got the game recently but my main character is a shield & waraxe heavily armoured orc with social problems (whenever I can brawl/intimidate/be lippy or hostile, I always take that option). I've decided in my head that he's a former Imperial Legionnaire who got dismissed for insubordination :P. I'm going to try and make him a serious tank. No magic at all except Berserk and Shouts, all points go into Health and Stamina, and take perks in Heavy Armour and Block. I might go into smithing later on, we'll see.
I'm thinking about doing the same with my elf, but going light armor and swords and some resto magic for wards. And I'd recommend smithing heavily for such a character, Steerpike, because the stuff you can make looks awesome - especially the orcish armor. :P
Whenever I get back to the states and I can play, I think I'm going to go Nord with a kinda of Ranger route: Marksmen, Light Armor, is there still Alchemy? Sneak, but maybe two.handed weapons.
There's still alchemy. Sneak with two-handed could work, but you're more noisy when you have heavy weapons drawn.
Too bad the gnome illusionist/thief isn't a choice, always a great character option.
You could sort of do that with a sneaky Wood Elf with Illusion skills and a goofy, gnomish-sounding name.
Bilton Chucklesworth.
Wood Elves are basically the forest gnomes of Tamriel.
Only with more ritual cannibalism.
Quote from: Steerpike
Only with more ritual cannibalism.
And Hairless Monkey Friends...
I don't think you can get the big damage bonus for sneak attacks with two-handed weapons.
I'm a fan of the good old stab'n'switch. Shank 'em with yer blade o' woe, then bop 'em with a big nasty basher. (honestly, between lock-picking, pickpocket, stealth, one-handed and archery, you can pretty much shank everybody like a boss)
or I go may full Conan the Barbarian. the warrior-thief and all that.
Can you sneak attack with spells?
Right now I'm playing with Brumond, my stoic middle-aged (and, of course, bearded) redguard warrior-mage. Mostly just running around having fun with a fire spell in one hand and a sword in the other.
Might do a more exotic character after I finish the main quest with Brumond (or before?) with a high elf doing sneak, illusion, alteration and conjuration. Generally just messing with people using fury and paralysis and stuff.
EDIT: I plan on doing some alchemy, but I probably won't bother too much with crafting otherwise. I'd rather play the game than just grind for better equipment... I have a short attention span :p
Quote from: Superfluous Crow
Can you sneak attack with spells?
Right now I'm playing with Brumond, my stoic middle-aged (and, of course, bearded) redguard warrior-mage. Mostly just running around having fun with a fire spell in one hand and a sword in the other.
Might do a more exotic character after I finish the main quest with Brumond (or before?) with a high elf doing sneak, illusion, alteration and conjuration. Generally just messing with people using fury and paralysis and stuff.
EDIT: I plan on doing some alchemy, but I probably won't bother too much with crafting otherwise. I'd rather play the game than just grind for better equipment... I have a short attention span :p
I think you can. I seem to do more damage when I catch my enemies unawares than I do when we're actually fighting one another.
I don't think you can sneak attack with spells. At least I've never seen anything to say you can, and if you sneak attack with a weapon it tells you got extra damage.
Ah, Here's a table (http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Sneak) explaining the damage breakdown with and without perks.
Quote from: Phoenix
I don't think you can sneak attack with spells. At least I've never seen anything to say you can, and if you sneak attack with a weapon it tells you got extra damage.
Ah, Here's a table (http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Sneak) explaining the damage breakdown with and without perks.
Not sure. When I sneak and use Firball, I can one shot bandits. When I am in combat with the same bandit, It takes two shots.
Quote from: Elemental_Elf
Quote from: Phoenix
I don't think you can sneak attack with spells. At least I've never seen anything to say you can, and if you sneak attack with a weapon it tells you got extra damage.
Ah, Here's a table (http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Sneak) explaining the damage breakdown with and without perks.
Not sure. When I sneak and use Firball, I can one shot bandits. When I am in combat with the same bandit, It takes two shots.
Interesting. Maybe it adds extra damage but doesn't announce a sneak attack?
Got myself Skyrim on XBox 360. I'm aiming for an assassin kind of build; with poisons (alchemy), dual wield and powerful attacks (one handed), subtlety and backstab (sneak), with some enchanting and leatherworking and perhaps illusion or restorative magics.
Does it seem like it could work?
Quote from: Magnus Pym
Got myself Skyrim on XBox 360. I'm aiming for an assassin kind of build; with poisons (alchemy), dual wield and powerful attacks (one handed), subtlety and backstab (sneak), with some enchanting and leatherworking and perhaps illusion or restorative magics.
Does it seem like it could work?
Absolutely. I enjoyed playing the stealth character. Though using stealth to travel through dungeons did seem to make them take longer. But you can do crazy damage with daggers, especially if you do the Dark Brotherhood quests.