Skyrim, or, How I Ruined My LifeFollow

Little children shouldn't have more hit points than dragons. Totally ruins immersion.

I don't know what the hell they did to the PS3 version. I've got both the 360 and PC versions and I've never had the game freeze on me.

Lucky you. I get freeze ups every other time I play the game. Got to the point where I made sure to quicksave often for fear that I would loose my progress.

Between Skyrim and Battlefield 3, I end up having to get up and reset my PS3 just about once every hour.

Just got Skyrim yesterday and only played a tiny bit with it last night.

Man, it's damn near impossible to construct a female character who doesn't look as though she was beaten in the face with a muskrat's ass. People in Skyrim age hard.

I think they just kind of suck with character creation engines, really. It can be done well, it's just not their strength.

Although you got to admit it is amusing that we take so much pride in making our characters look as good as we can in a game where we never see their face unless we pan out and whip the camera in front of them. Even then certain helms hide their face completely.

Joph- If you're on PC, head on over to Skyrim Nexus, get their mod manager, & nab "no more blocky faces" & the "detailed faces" mods.

It'll help. So will the HD textures if your rig is decent.

Meh, I made a Bosmer who looks Asian. It was kind of the best I could hope for.

Don't over power your spell pool initially is my advice, MP is finite until you start finding items with good MP regen, or cost reduction. (i like MP regen, because swapping sets for every spell you cast sucks.)

I took a few sneak > backstab, One hand Crit, Stamina reduction (benefits conjured swords as well) and one arrow damage mod (all though conjured bow is stupidly strong and I feel I wasted that point.)

Your spells just won't have the damage to MP ratio early on, and you will find yourself having to kite fights for a long time if you are dependent on MP for both survival and damage.

(or you could always just make some op clothes early if you get lucky with disenchants with alchemy/enchanting/smithing and go all out mage pretty easily.)

I found spell casting a bit boring. No matter what gear and spells I got, going heavy armor and just plowing through mobs with a sword in one hand and Flames in the other was a lot faster than pure spell casting.

Not to mention the survivability. When you run out of magicka - which you will, at least early on - being skilled in heavy armor and one-handed weapons makes a huge difference.

Diff'rent strokes, I guess, but the game just feels designed around physical combat. I'm a huge spell casting fan, so I always go spell casting first, but in this particular game, I felt I was being constantly steered towards physical combat.

I found that, post level 20, the physical characters started to get a lot harder though. Particularly against dragons.

For me, I went through Oblivion recently just spam clicking my melee attacks and driving everything into the ground before me.

Basic game play in Skyrim isn't really different so I figured I should try a different character style 'lest I be bored within a couple hours.

Semi-related, since I'm actually looking at mage gear now, I noticed my +50% Magicka regen Novice robes are values at around 155 and the Illusion Robes with +50% Magicka Regen and 12% Illusion bonus are worth about 20. What's up with that zaniness?

Casting has two big problems.

1. How Magicka pools, magicka costs, and gear advance relative to each other. You start hitting some really annoying points where you are going OOM just way too fast, but downgrading your spells is too big a damage loss. It's rectified once you get stronger cost reduction gear, but it's annoying early on.

2. The fact that you have no way to buff your destruction damage. You are essentially going to plateau at 90 damage per spell (though fire can go higher, if the target is on fire, and the other two schools will damage stamina or magicka). I don't remember how strong doublecasting makes it, though. Powerful, sure. But compared to the damage that weapon-based characters can get, even assuming they aren't combining alchemy/smithing/enchanting to ludicrous ends? It just doesn't compare, imo. I really do think that Fortify Destruction should buff its damage.

Only thing I use spells for is to set pools on fire.

At level 51, with heavy armor & smithing capped as well as the difficulty cranked to max, the only issues I have as a Greatsword major/bow minor character are against large groups of mages (I'll snipe those) or the "super" dragons that can spawn on account of the dangerous dragons mod (Dragonrend to keep em' grounded, the darkmare tanks them- yay for invincible horses-& I snipe away from way back).

Other than that, I don't even have to block anymore, really. I only touched magic when required for the mage college quests.

I looted some axe last night that does extra damage against targets on fire. Now I just need a quick-switch bind so I can work on my Puff'n Sting

If you play this on PC, you may be interested in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Creation Kit For PC, released today.

Take the perk to upgrade magic items and you can raise the base damage quite a bit. That sword is pretty fun on Draugers. Sends them exploding and running in all directions. Which can be kind of messy, but fun.

Azura still has her stone in this game. She's on a mountain peak between Ulfric's pad and the mage's college. Less on the case of being "easy" to get though. Without spoiling too much you will have to kill quite a few casters to complete the quest. (on my first character that lead me to quick frustration, haven't been back to try to get it)

Based on four things:
1. Size of soul
2. Enchanting skill level
3. Perks taken that increase the effect
4. Temporary effects or equipment that boost enchanting

Even using a Grand Soul Gem, sometimes my "enchant ring" enchants would only give a +3% bonus at low levels. Once I had the perks and high enchanting, I think it would be around 20%. Guessing that without the perks, it would be around 10% at high level enchanting (maybe 12% or so).

On the topic of soul gems, it's annoying as hell that souls get put into whatever gem you have available. Bought some Grand Soul Gems and accidentally infused them with petty souls.

Battlemage =/= "Pure caster" so nyeah

But thanks for the tip on the rocks. I remember them being scarcer in Oblivion but then I got the Azuria stone and stopped worrying about it. At least now I know I can crank out piles of enchanted crap.

Want!

Had some fun rolling around with my "evil" mage yesterday. He's collecting all the Daedric artifacts and generally being a bit of a power-hungry bastard. He roams around killing anyone he can't otherwise get something from, and stealing childrens' dreams. 50% of the time he's also faceless, because his Dragon Priest masks doesn't always like to render.

Started him on the Dark Brotherhood quests. SpoilerWhen given the option to guess which captive should be killed, I totally incinerated all 3 of them. Best to tie up the loose ends, I figured. I was amused to find that that's totally an option.

Edited, Feb 7th 2012 12:42pm by Eske

I did the same thing. Execution style from behind, arrows to the base of the neck.

Edited, Feb 7th 2012 2:17pm by lolgaxe