Most of those things are only overpowered if you intentionally make them so. Just levelling Illusion, Enchanting, Simithing organically as you play the game don't break it.

I think this is my main issue with a lot of these complaints. People are complaining about things being overpowered when they power-level them with the intent of making their character as poweful as possible as quickly as possible. The OP wants to be able to do this. He also wants to not be able to do this. But he wants the game to be "balanced" to make this the case rather than it being a choice. It just doesn't make any kind of sense.

Illusion is very iffy. If I can charm it, I can kill it with absolutely no recourse.

Granted that is my choice and please don't mistake it for complaint, but it's nothing to do with the way I've levelled or anything else. I have no problem exercising restraint on this front, but that is my personal choice.

Edit: As background, the character in question is level 27, still using the first 'charm' spell, calm and as I say, unless it's immune to charm/I'm being stupid I can kill it naked with a rubber spork and there's NOTHING they can do about it.

Perhaps a side effect of you going out of combat when the enemies are charmed which kicks mana regen to the out of combat high rate. Not hard to do though and I've definitely not gone out of my way to do it. Far from it.

This

So you would have them patch enchanting, alchemy and smithing after I spent so much time leveling them ( i dont exploit) just so you can have more fun but what of my fun?


Why change the game for you and make it a game i dont want to play?

If you dont try to deliberately exploit the game and play it as the game is designed and you end up with an overpowered character and are forced to increase the difficulty level of the game then there is something wrong with their game design

Illusion, conjuration are way too effective ... no powerleveling necessary. Enchanting trivializes mana usage ... no powerleveling necessary (The strongest mage in Skyrim apparently needs only base 100 magicka). Smithing is broken when you can level to 100 doing iron daggers, it's too easy to power level it.

So ... who do these balance loopholes cater to ? If you want to feel like god, you can play on novice.

Uhm completion is definately in the eye of the beholder or so it seems!

If you call many broken unsolvable quests part 'o a completed game, you are very wrong indeed! Not to mention all the glitches, missing effects and what not!

If you don't exploit you shouldn't be affected too much. I do think that user created gear should be at most 20% more powerful than gear you can get by other means and that bonus stacking should be limited as well.

And yet you just replied with "this" to someone whose example of how you can become overpowered was....

"However, stack 4 pieces of gear with +25% Smithing & drink a Blacksmith Elixir... You now can craft items that the gods themselves envy."

On what planet is that not deliberate? How is raising smithing to 100 by making iron daggers not deliberate?

Again you're trying to have your cake and eat it.

@ Ashandes: the rest of the post that guy replied to made sense though

Of course it's deliberate. But it's not exploitive. It's something incredibly obvious and something anyone with half a brain would do in the course of normal gameplay. Until they realized "uh oh this just ruined the game".

And you don't even need to use smithing enchants. Just having 100 smithing and 100 enchanting makes it so that nothing in the game is challenging, even on Master.

The game should be challenging on the highest level of difficulty, and it should include bosses that challenge those who simply level 2 crafting professions to 100.

No synergy or looping or any crazy stuff is required to take all the challenge out of MASTER difficulty. That is a problem.

Completely 100% agree with the OP. I am sick & tired of creating invisible barriers for my character just so that it can remain in the realm of playable. Right now this game needs to be overhauled. So many of the trees are either broken or just plain useless. In addition to the ones he already mentioned you can add lockpicking & pickpocket to the list. Both of them are complete garbage. There is no incentive to take lockpicking unless you are lazy/having difficulty understanding the concept. Hidden treasure perk is garbage. Increased chance of special treasure by 50%. WOW. So now instead of a 10% chance of a enchanted item I have a 15% chance. You make a greater profit by putting 1 point in haggling in speech tree over the course of the game & its the first thing in the speech tree. The only decent perk in the entire pickpocket tree is extra pockets.

I agree with your sentiments. If people would just play the game the way it is designed, they could avoid what they don't like. If they know these exploits, simply not using them is the way to go.

This is comical. Leveling armor-making to 100 with out any other attempt to boost skills, then expecting to be able to swing that powerful sword you made effectively is ridiculous. Role-playing a Armor Maker by focusing in crafting then expecting him to be a competent mage with no practice is ridiculous. Plain and simple.

I can only imagine why the dev team never posts anything any more....probably because of the lame bull about levelling a pointless (in regards to combat in general) skill to the max, exploiting a small oversight in experience generation, then MOANING about being too powerful or too weak to face their level 18 enemy's with 15 in attack skills.

There's only a few legit threads in the technical sub forum worthy of the devs attention, im glad that they ignore this one, thus it wont bloat the OPs silly attitude.

If you got to level 100 and expect not to be powerful and do not take that into consideration, you are just stupid.

The argument was that having dragon armor available at level 15 makes gameplay trivial ... nothing about mage-blacksmith being underpowered. That woud make sense. Roleplaying blacksmith being gamebreaking doesn't make sense.

How is he choosing to unbalance his character? You don't know that it is going to cause issues until you've already done it. Ignoring enchanting and everything else he's stated you can still unbalance the difficulty purely by levelling up in a natural way. This is entirely down to the devs who should be balancing the game. Hell, EVERYTHING in the game should be way more balanced than it is. They haven't even bothered trying with most things. Some simple math would've told them that certain areas are glaringly unbalanced. So either they haven't bothered to check the formulas or they've ignore the numbers because modders will fix it. Well that is just damn lazy either way and especially taking into account that people like myself have paid 60 pounds for the game on xbox so these mods will never help me.

How bout you apply your rule to other games? Fifa 12 is easy if I use lofted through balls. Well I could choose to not use them but they are completely legitimate option in a game of football and I shouldn't have to curb my play style because the AI is easily exploited.

There is a big difference between modding the console to hype up a character and playing normally. People should be able to play naturally without having to work out if what they're doing will ruin the balance of the game. The devs should've dealt with that

Exploitive is kind of a broad term in this respect. Min/maxing stuff is not strictly exploiting, but it is using the game system to try and make you character as powerful as possible. That's where the having your cake and eating it comes from. People who deliberately doing things to try and make the most powerful character they can and then complaining that some of those things make them overpowered.

Someone... I2edShift, suggested caps for crafting. There would be other ways of limiting as well. That would stop people being able to make overpowered characters at the expense of restricting freedom. Which is what the OP wants. And there are definitely issues with some skills to do with the speed at which the level that could do with some fine tuning. But I tend to prefer a more hands off approach to balance.

If they patched in hard caps on all the caps on the way people are exploting deliberately maximising results from crafting do you think there'd be more or less people complaining about it?

I guess at the end of the day one of the... well flaws isn't the right word... issues with the TES games is they can never get it it right because by trying to be relatively open and freeform (less so these days, but still a lot to compared to other similar games) and it's impossible to get it just right for the tastes of everyone playing. A lot of this isn't right or wrong with regards to design. It just comes down o personal preference.

I can say the same. If you expect developers to balance the game, you are just stupid.

You buy it for a platform that has zero options for customizing yet you cry to Bethesda for changes? If they actually implemented changes that things people complain about, a whole new group of people would be angry they changed it. It would be a vicious circle. Rant = pointless. No they aren't going to rebalance anything with any patches. I don't ever recall any "rebalance patches" in past games. All you get is bug fixes. Should have bought the PC version.

Well I think the frustration powergamers have is that all the effort to make your character powerful isn't fun unless there are things you can test your newfound power against. We expect that if developers put in things to make us super powerful, they will also put in some enemies, somewhere, that will challenge those powers.

We want optional content that will push characters to their limits. Think Ruby and Emerald Weapon from FF7. In my opinion every RPG should have a Ruby Weapon, because that kind of stuff is incredibly fun.

Absolutely, OOO made Oblivion a brand new game, I was bored to death with vanilla game, then I put 150 hours more in it.
Who's the guy again? Hope he'll give a look to Skyrim as well.

This isn't a multiplayer game, imbalance is fine if its canon or whatever.

The imbalance caused by being a moron with Smithing and Enchanting/Alchemy will never be fixed, the only thing Bethesda can do is make the EXP earned different in smithing with every item at every level and add small limits on things or give disadvantages.

Either way the next patch will be purely Performance related things, if they do add anything else other than that, id be surprised.

Then you don't mind Beth fixing my playstyle and dampen yours. As it isn't a multiplayer game you don't care. Good that we talked about this.