NOT most/least powerful.

Best, I personally think block stands out more than any other as what I'd like to see in future games. Other than the 5 point sink at the beginning, every perk changes how you can use a shield and adds utility rather than just making your character's stats raise.

Worst, I'd go with illusion. Part of it might be the fault of illusion spell design, but everything in the tree either makes the spells cost less or allows them to affect more creatures. Not an interesting perk in the entire tree, your use of the affected spells doesn't change, you just get to use them against more targets instead of having them essentially fizzle based on the target's level which you can't see. In fact having such a reference to creature levels is a bit immersion breaking, seeing the little message telling you a bandit _insert scaled adjective_ is too high level for calm or pacify or whatever is not so great - you're trying to into the gameworld/atmosphere and they suddenly remind you of all the hidden numbers in play with a not very subtle text message.

Edit: Quiet casting is cool actually. One decent perk in the tree. Still the worst though.

Illusion is good for the thief, though. Quiet Casting, then the spells Invisibilty and Muffle help a lot. But that's beside the topic.

I think Pickpocket is the worst besides the Extra Pockets perk. Pretty useless unless you go around digging through people's pockets. Which might be common among you Skyrim fans, but not me. I mean, really, "Keymaster". Waste of a Perk Point. If I want something an NPC has, I'll kill him. Unless they're essential, then I'm out of luck. "Night Thief" too.

I think Sneak is the most useful. Gives you extra damage with weapons, and abilities such as not triggering pressure plates, or being able to roll. Useful in combat if you time it right.

"Shadow Warrior" is good if you need to get away from an especially dangerous opponent.

Disagree with the design of the block perk tree.

If I want to be a barbarian two hander, I have to waste 2 shield perks to get faster movement whilst blocking?

Disappointing!

I think Alteration it my least favourite, because you are forced to take reduction perks to gain access to ability perks. This doesn't occur in the other magic schools past novice, so (for a jack of all trades like my character) it makes the decent Alteration perks nonviable without heavy investment.

-HK

I'm not even thinking most useful vs. least useful either. I'm asking which are best designed irrespective of their practicality in game. In essence, which are fun and which are boring?

One perk I like for an example is respite. It adds an extra function to a spell which can significantly impact your playstyle by adding new potential strategies. It doesn't just make something X% better or cheaper.

Ah yes, good point, the structure of the tree I agree is bad. I was focused on the perks individually. I actually dislike the tree structuring of perks in general as there are quite a few perks you have to waste on things you won't be using or getting much benefit from to reach ones more applicable to your playstyle.

When considering structure, I might actually change my worst to lockpicking. The locks you need the least help with, you have to perk through to get to the ones you might need some help with, but by the time you reach the lockpicking level required you'll probably be drowning in picks + having less trouble due to higher skill levels at that point. Golden touch and treasure hunter are the only ones that someone might want, but that's a 5 perk investment for essentially a gold boost, while just 1 point in speechcraft at the beginning of the game would probably result in more extra money in the long run without requiring any leveling up of the skill to reach it either.

Pickpocket is definitley the worst designed tree in the game in my opinion. There are useful abilites in this tree aside from the starting perks, extra pockets, misdirection and perfect touch, and I guess you could add poisoned if you do alchemy, but thats it. The fact that they based an entire skill on such a miniscule part of the game is just dumb, im not sure how anyone can say otherwise. You can pretty much put most of this into the sneak tree so it makes no sense.

Also hilarity and usefulness aside, the perfect touch ability is ridiculous. How can you unequip someones entire armor set off of them? Im willing to suspend my disbelief for many things but I just couldnt buy that one. The lockpicking tree seems more like a mod someone would put in to help them RP better rather than a useful skill.

I agree on Blocking having the best perks.

However, I don't agree on Illusion being the words, even though I understand why would you pick that one, OP.

In my case, I find Lockpicking to be the worst since it's totally useless.

Novice-Master Locks - I had a character with Lockpicking at about 60 and had no problem with opening ANY of the locks.

Quick Hands - As if I'm getting noticed now.

Wax Key - Not once did I feel this perk come in handy in any shape or form possible.

Golden Touch/Treasure Hunter - Just more dull gold and random loot (as if I don't get enough of those anyway).

Locksmith - As if picking lock wasn't easy enough already.

Unbreakable - My lockpicks break everyonce in a blue moon (not to mention that you can get tons of lockpicks very easily).

And I know what are you aiming at with this trhead, OP.

You are not aiming at how useful something is, but rather how interesting/dull some perks are.

Still, I just wanted to point out that even trees which seem to be interesting can still be totally ruined if developers are not paying attention.

They are made that way because mastery of stronger perks first requirers mastery of weaker ones.
You want to run without knowing how to walk?
Yeah right.

Best design, smithing.

worst design, the rest. Mostly because they are not creative, uninspired and cheap. (5/5) perks are the most creative thing they came up with? Not to mention the many perks that were copied from fallout 3. Poorly designed mish mash of things that look like they were left for last when making the game and threw them in there.

Smithing is one of the worst IMO. You can reach armor cap with any armor, but many players can't get the weapon / armor styles they actually want to wear without going through several unwanted perks. Especially if you like light armor but want to use daedric weapons. Dragonbone made it slightly better but I think the structure of the tree is overly restrictive. Plus, I wouldn't call any of the smithing perks creative. They are all just "you can make X material weapons and armor". They could've done much more with it.

I really like the upper end pickpocket perks, and IMHO those do fall into the category of game changing rather than just "better at what you already do". The ability to pickpocket equipped weapons allows me to play very differently. I don't like killing people by the hundreds, so in bandit lairs I pickpocket their weapons and either hold or dump them somewhere. Then I try to stealth the whole cave/fort/whatever. If I get caught then a good number of bandits are unarmed, allowing me to escape.

Neither the one handed nor two handed trees adds much of anything in terms of new capability.

All of the "20% better, 40% better" perks need to go. That is what skill is for.

Lockpick perks could have allowed the opening of certain types of locks, rather than just making you better at it.

Could probably go on forever. Perks were a huge opportunitiy missed. Some are fun like pickpocket, persuasion/intimidation, etc. Most are just unimaginative skill enhancers. There are times that I think of the five year development cycle of Skyrim and wonder "is that the best you could do?".

You did say "not the most useful/useless". Smithing does what is designed for. It allows you to create armor and weapons you want. It has it flaws like having the advanced heavy armors on the light armor side and it increases armor rating and weapon damage (cheap in my opinion) should have been used for armor and weapon degradation but it's design wise it's good. Maybe not the best... you know what, you changed my mind.

It's been a while since I had vanilla perk trees but I recall that Lockpicking tree, for all its uselessness, was well structured in that it had multiple branching steps. You know, like a tree.

The best? Why, lockpicking of course!

In all seriousness, I like the block tree, had a lot of usefull perks.

The worst? I would have to say smithing; I have to go all the way through the heavy side to get light armor? Really?

Conjuration because it basically has 4 diferent paths you can take

The four paths alter the following.

-Atronachs

-Reanimated undead

-Bound Weapons

-Spell Reduction

The worst designed perk tree would be lockpicking.

To be fair, we don't know how they spent their time and resources. Their priorities I'm sure were way different than mine would've been. Sometimes I'll see something in game and think "wow, that's neat and really well done, but they probably spent way too much effort on it instead of X, Y, and Z more important elements of the gameplay that could've used more work."

As for the best tree in the game imo, might be enchanting, and or conjuration.

Oh god, lockpicking. It's annoying for me, as I would totally put skill points into making master/expert level locks easier to pick, or making picks never break, but jesus christ, a lot has to be invested in it before you get to the good stuff. I have absolutley no trouble with any other lock difficulty, so almost every point I put into it is useless.

Best skill trees? Well, my personal favourite was always archery. You can do some really cool stuff with it. Zooming in, slowing down time, all things that make you feel like a legolas-style badass instead of the weakling that archery made me feel like in oblivion. Not sure whether it's interestingly designed, though. For interesting design, I'd say that alchemy's pretty good, just because it allows you to become specialised. I personally love to use poisons, so I used it primarily to further my use of those whilst leaving most of my own healing to the restoration tree. It allows you to feel like a true expert in your field. That's my opinion, anyway.

Sure, but why would a guy wielding a two handed sword need to learn to use a shield to move faster whilst blocking.... with his sword?

EDIT: Left hand should have been for shield only perks, as it initially starts.

Agree, blocking to me is the worst for that reason. I don't use shields, but I do block and even enjoy the sport of it, I'd love to perk it but never do because it specifies shield on the first one and I can't bare to waste a perk.

Heavy Armour is not only considered heavily inferior due to the armour cap, but it's tree is filled with superfluous garbage. You need two flavour/quality of life perks to get to weightless armour. Fists of Steel adds H2H damage based on BASE armour rating, and Cushioned adds half falling damage. The right side isn't much better. Well Fitted/Matching Set is useless due to the restrictive armor cap, Tower of Strength says it reduces stagger but after some extensive trial and error testing on my part using the console the perk appears to do absolutely nothing. Reflect Blows is okay even if it doesn't reduce any of the damage that is dealt to yourself and simply deals damage to the enemy, but its certainly not worth the investment to get there.

Heavy Armour got the shaft pretty badly this game. Two branching completely linear paths, and the two paths do not even seem to share a common theme with seemingly random perks thrown in there "because". This tree is both weak and poorly designed.

Point taken!

I have feeling that they should've made perks work more like those in original FOs (didn't play new ones).