First you harp on about how people who want balance are asking for the devs to restrict the game and then you rebuttal the argument that not every class works equally well which is restricting the game by accusing people of not playing as the devs intended. Self contradict much?


I'm telling you something that is factually true about the game that anyone who owns the game can look up and recognize to be the way I describe it and you keep saying I don't have any facts.

You're just trying to talk your way out of actually discussing the issue.


You contradict yourself and you dodge when asked to talk about the actual issues being discussed. You're really just trolling at this point.

Indeed enchanting is even more broken in this game compared to previous TES games and that does state something is very very wrong! In fact, even vendor items have really insane modifiers like %40 on a skill or %70 resistance on an element. And you can do far better than that.

If I drink a warrior's potion that's sold by a vendor, my Dragonbane jumps up to 515 damage with just 80 skill. I can hardly level it up because everything gets gibbed or 2-shot even in master difficulty. If I don't bother with a potion, it's still 343 damage. And that's just upgraded & modified with basic daedric longsword damage. I bet I can push 1000 damage if I tried a daedric warhammer.

Seriously, it's totally out of hand and this is the first time I had to max out difficulty in a Bethesda game just to play it like normal mode.

I realize the word min/max has been warped over the last couple years by the WoW crowd but whatever....

That said, for all the folks that say balance doesn't matter in a SP game, I think we can discount whatever they say in a discussion about balance. Enchanting is pretty clearly far too powerful, alchemy/smithing less so but still rather more powerful than it should be. Personally I'm fine just ignoring them, but not everyone enjoys a game where they need to self-restrict their playstyles to find themselves a challenge, and they have a perfectly valid complaint here.

Sorry, but you obviously didn't read all previous posts where we already said that different players want different things in games. This thread is only about players that want a challenge and want a balanced game to allow that challenge to be fun. Players that want to listen to the story or roleplay, and don't care with character development or a balanced game, really don't even need to care with this thread. There are a bunch of other threads out there talking about other things

People don't have an issue with the fact that different players enjoy different levels of challenge, afterall, you don't see anyone complain that there is a difficulty slider. Nobody says "Man, the difficulty slider is overpowered, why wouldn't I set it all the way to the bottom?!".

What people are complaining about is that the difficulty changes depending in how you build your character, and that means that if you prefer Fireballs to summoned Atronarchs for example you'll have a much harder time, no matter what you set the difficulty to.

Hmm. Min/max (or powergaming), as someone who's been playing various types of RPGs for thirty years, has always been about becoming overpowered. Particularly in olden-days D&D, being a "min/maxer" was generally considered a negative thing... unless, of course, your whole group was playing that way.


Yes, there are some games that are built around requiring min/maxing (D&D Online, for instance. Or your typical Diablo-style ARPG, at least on the higher difficulties.) But many games don't require it, or only provide some optional challenges for the min/max crowd (the Emerald & Ruby Weapon fights in Final Fantasy 7, for instance) - their regular difficulties aren't built around that level of power, and if you (for example) use the guidebook to find the Disk One Nuke, you'll be plowing through the game without even needing to pay attention.




I guess it depends on the attitude & view point you're coming from. My Skyrim character is currently lv38. Been pursuing Smithing reasonably strongly (I hit 70, so I could make Glass armor, at around lv36). Been doing Alchemy a bit less intently (every once in awhile, I'll make some new healing potions, and blow through other ingredients looking for combinations)... it's maybe 50? Haven't really been doing much with Enchantng. I've D/E'd a bunch of stuff to gather abilites, but the stuff I can enchant is so much weaker than the stuff I find that I haven't bothered making myself any gear yet. Not having any perks in it probably doesn't help.

And this all feels like "normal play" to me. I don't think "Oh, I'm going to Self Limit? myself..... I'm just using the skills as they come up. Putting perks in Enchanting is something I've thought about, but there always seems to be something more important to do with them. (Only started giving Alchemy some perks in the high 20's... again, other things seemed more important. But I wanted to get somewhat stronger heal potions, so I dropping in a few perks finally.)


Yeah, I guess if you're really obsessed with Maximum Power!, you may have to keep telling yourself that "Ok, I've got to ignore skills X, Y, and Z, to not overdo it." And yeah, that seems like it might get to be annoying. But that seems more like the responsibility of the player and his/her personality quirks, rather than the designers'. (I'm pretty sure I'd rather not play a game that was designed from the standpoint of having to build the game around what powergamers might feel "forced" to do. )

WELL.... I have to say, obsidian did an amazing job re-balencing fallout new vegas. That game, like skyrim, was epic in many ways, but started off with bad, some times game breaking bugs, and had awfull balencing.(Im about to talk about FNV, but bear with me, Im making a point here )

Here was the prob, Guns was the only practical choice to use, they were every where, ammo was cheap, and all the best perks for it came at early lvls. The 2nd best combat skills were, oddly, melle, and unarmed. I know,in a world filled with guns and explosives, kinda wierd. While many of the weapons in these classes were useless, some stood out,did tons of dmg, and were easy to get,the only prob was that the few perks for theses skills were at least 60+. The third tier was energy weapons. They were horrible. Before dlc,or balencing patches, there was not a single, practical energy weapon. Any energy weapon that wasnt extreamly weak, was extreamly stron, and used tons of ammo per shot, which was very expensive.It only had a 2 or 3 perks, and most of them were awful. Lastly, explosives. These started off terrible.They were hard to use, weak(odd for explosives), and expensive.

The combat in vinila was prity bad, VERY UNBALENCED. BUT>.. One thing they did outstandingly well was the no-combat/crafting skills.Barter,meh, I could do with out most of the time, I scraqed through as far as getting caps went. What realy impressed me was speech. In allmost every quest, you could put your silver tounge to work, and either find a non violent solution to the problem, or gain extra bonuses/caps afterwards. It was very well done, and Im kinda dissapointed TesV didnt make these skills(or just speech, since they are a hybrid) more like FONV. As far as the crafting went, they had excelent perks, and speech checks, so they worked well too. I realy think lock picking should go back to the skill check,(0 very easy,25 easy,50 med.,75 hard, 100 very hard, or there counter part tes names). You shouldnt have to take perks in the tree to pick these, they should just make it easier to pick locks,but your skill should determine if you can or cant.

So why the wall of text?FONV had some major balencing issues in the combat before all the patches and the dlc. FONV had very usefull non combat skills from the begining. Skyrims combat skills are a desastor as far as balencing goes.Skyrim has some good(to some people to good) crafting skills, and some that dont have as obvious a s a benifit, but help the game.

Obsidian did a great job balencing the game, but it took a long time(all most a year!) ,and started off rocky. Im hoping it will be the same with skyrim, bethesda just needs to get there act togather, and do it.

Edit:sorry about the mistakes in it, as you can see, I had a lot to say, so I went kind of fast.

When you make your own game, we'll talk. Also, ever hear of patches?

It remains to be seen if Bethesda actually has the guts to make needed balancing adjustments in their patches. Hasn't it been said, that they historically only fix bugs?

With enough whining it's possible, but I could careless. People are going to baw their eyes out, but in five or so years they will buy the new Elder Scrolls game only to whine. I've played over a hundred hours and I'm very satisfied with this game and can't wait to play the eight other races after my Imperial.

Min-Max'ing doesn't have anything to do with being "overpowered". It is about Maximizing desired effects while minimizing undesired effects. Getting the most skill/power boosts while minimizing point expenditure, harmful effects, etc. Whether that in the end is overpowered compared to the balance of the game or not is an entirely separate issue. If your old D&D considered man/max'ing a negative thing, that sounds like a rather, err, inflexible group to play with.

Bethesda gave us an Enchanting tree to use and skill points to use in it. If using that tree allows you to breeze through the game's content, that isn't min/max'ing, that is poorly balanced game mechanics.

Or I'm a paying customer. Also, you ever hear of releasing a game finished instead of half assed.

If you get the dual wielding perk with your destruction mage, it is possible to deal a LOT of damage dua wielding, but i am only at level 28, so we will see, but the magika not regenerating like it should is absolutely ridiculous. I was sneaking around, and the eye was HARDLY open, and my magika went from regening like it should, to hardly going up at all...seriously....wtf......

The question is, why does the game need to have seriously overpowered characters in the first place?


I mean when I make a top 11 list of my favourite single player RPGs from the last two decades: (Only one game per series allowed)

System Shock 2
Gothic 2
Mass Effect 2
Fallout 3
Morrowind
Deus Ex
Knights of the Old Republic
The Witcher 2
Neverwinter Nights
Drakensang
Dark Messiah of Might and Magic

Elderscrolls is still up there, sure, because it's a great world setting, and the gameplay is top knotch, but it's the only series that has invoulnerable characters and utterly ridiculous variation in character power depending on how you build your character.

The fact is, The Elderscrolls would be by far my favourite series if they did two things better: For one they should hire some writers to have the missions be less one dimensional. I'd like missions you can resolve missions in accordance with whatever alignment your character might have. If you need to beat up and old woman to join the only fighters guild in the game there is just a serious problem with one sided mission writing, since that pretty much leaves no faction for fighter characters who aren't into that sort of thing. The second thing is that I want to see an actual effort to bring congruence to magic and weapons and not have the two systems so completely at odds with each other in every game. Even in games where the systems for the two are completely different the developers usually manage some kind of balance, but Elderscrolls has never gotten it right.

Those aren't huge things to ask for, and they aren't things that are utterly uncommon in single player RPGs.

Let me ask this question. If I don't take any smithing perks or any enchanting perks, will my character be overpowered? I'll do without those if that will fix it.

I am playing o nthe 360 version and i noticed the game is only 3.7 gigs large. seriously....why?! I have never heard of a game that took 6 years to make being so ridiculously tiny.

Even if you take smithing and enchanting your character won't nescesarely be overpowered, since you don't have to use those two systems in congruence to make overpowered items, it just opens the option to do so. The serious issue with crafting is when you use enchanting to create a suit of items that lets you make better potions, and then use those to make a potion that lets you do better enchanting, and so on...

As it stands, any character that wields weapons will be significantly more powerful in a fight than a mage that does damage with destruction magic past around level 30-40, since weapons have room to go up, but destruction doesn't scale up past its top end spells, and gets far less overall damage increase from its perks.

Its called compression technology.

In past games, Mysticism was a completely ununified school that was a pain in the ass to level because of the lack of cohesion in its effects, several being similar to effects sported by other schools.

Now, Alteration is serving as defensive and utility magic: Much simpler than having both functions equally split between Alteration and Mysticism.


As far as the main complaint: NO TES game has ever had anywhere near balance in character builds. At least Alchemy and Enchanting are much less broken this time around than they used to be. Alchemy in Morrowind made Pun-Pun's day.


I'm not seeing any of those RPGs as possessing the qualities you claim Skyrim lacks: It's very possible to create a stupidly overpowered character in all the above, as well as stupidly gimped one. (The first Knights of the Old Republic is laughable in this regard: Soldier/Knights blow away all other classes unless you do a counter 2/18 build, which is as obnoxious as efficient leveling in Oblivion.)

At the same time once you are lvl 40 as destro mage you have probably finished the main story lines and can retire/wait for some mods/dlc packs. And if you don't train anything besides destro, resto, alteration, speech ... do you even level up past the lvl 40 mark ? There must be a cap besides which you can't go if you stay pure destro mage and its not lvl 81.

other games used compression as well, Ie Rage, and the games were 7.4 gigs per disc. Those extra 4 gigs could have been used to smooth out the details on the characters outfits and just overall put more into the game.

If you really think this game, that took six years and millions of dollars to build, is half-assed because one or two skill tress either aren't working quite as intended, or are but weren't quite to your liking... well then I'm not really prepared to believe much of what you say.

There are thousands upon thousands of lines of incredibly complex code that are in this game and I'm willing to bet money that you don't even understand most of them. I don't. Don't act like the one tiny thing that you do understand makes a game half-assed just because it isn't the way you would have made it, if you could have. Which you can't.

The Russians just launched one of the most expensive and ambitious space missions in the last three or four decades. The probe failed to reach its destination, and is probably going to crash soon. A lot of people are calling the mission half-assed and the mission designers idiots. Excuse me, but if you have no damned clue whatsoever what goes into something that's incredibly complicated, you can just keep your damn mouth shut if you have a problem with the people behind it. See a problem? Point it out and then let the people that know what they are doing handle the fixing.

Well, I'm playing as an archer and one-handed weapons. I'm not going to use both together. Problem solved for me.

Well, you'll almost inevitably end up leveling restoration, lockpicking and persuasion as you play Skyrim. Maybe not with perks, but they will certainly go up during normal play, since thei're just skills you end up using.

The thing about magic is, even if you're not a pure destruction mage, your damage is still low. I've been playing a mage on master difficulty, and I just passed the 30 mark. I can manage, even without enchantment, it's not impossible, but it takes a lot of time and a lot of summoned atronarchs. The thing is simply this, in order to kill enemies you need to do damage to them. No ammount of controlling, dodging, distracting, paralyzing or outhealing your enemies will actually make them die, at some point in time or another you have to reduce their hitpoints to zero, and mages simply have nothing to do this efficiently. They either need to be able to throw out more damage in general - so they can kill things faster - or they need to be able to cast some cheap but long lasting damage over time spells, so they can focus on all the other magic stuff while something is still working to actually kill the enemy.




It's textures and sounds that make a game bigger, so Skyrims modular design keeps the asset list relatively small for a game of its size. The big limiting factor to character detail on the XBox and Playstation is their small RAM.

You can frenzy all enemies minus things like dragons if you over-charge the spell. I am level 77 and can still frenzy guards by overcharging it.

BTW this assumes you already perked everything else in the Illusion tree helping your spells become stronger.