I feel absolutely silly for putting so much time and effort into collecting ebony ore and daedra hearts(I have 118!?). Is there any point at all to daedric armor outside of the the option to make/upgrade daedric weapons since steel and elven can reach the armor cap for 4-5 less perks?

on that same note- is there a table for weapons? I was wondering if there was a huge difference between a deadric weapon vs a steel weapon after upgrades.

Haha, my personal preference is the "hug of death" when using a 1H sword. My little toon girl is just "Aw, you tried so hard..." And then this swordblade erupts through the enemy's back. Good times.
-Loth

For the looks? Ah, my precious videogame vanity!

The more you improve weapons, especially to the levels discussed in this thread, the smaller the difference becomes. This is because the improvements are a flat number that is the same for any weapon added to the base, not a percentage increase of it. Daedric weapons will do the most damage... period. But after improving a bunch of times, an elven weapon will do nearly the same... 10 pts less I think (or something along those lines), which is negligible when you are already dealing out so much damage anyway.

-Loth

Edit: I'm sure Cheshyr will eventually post in a weapon chart from all the testing that's been done by Domilasa, et al., in earlier threads... but there's a lot to sift through.

Apologies. We do have weapon data, but i've been too busy working or playing teh game to update post 4.

Short version: Elven is 5% behind Daedric after improvements. You can also get away with Nordic Hero weapons, and still be within 5-10% Daedric weapon damage. Turns out, it's pretty easy to get to the point where you can 2-3hit Alduin, so just upgrade your weapons to the point that is comfortable for you, and leave it at that.

Vanity plays a huge part in it. I hope someone makes a mod that makes steel armor look like daedric because i would not be caught dead wearing steel armor no matter how efficient it is.

I guess the question now is how to make the game challenging after you've reached this pinnacle of strength. Its awesome getting to this point but if the game becomes pointless easy then theres no reason to continue. I remember in dragon age you could modify nearly every aspect of monster stats and scaling through a text file of a mod. I recall some people disliked how enemies in oblivion would scale to your level but i think its a feature/option much needed in skyrim,

If you want some cool-ass armor, check out the steel plate you can forge from getting the advanced armors perk (smithing =50). It's worn by a female warrior in the Whiterun inn (Bannered Mare). It's heavy as hell, but when you're vain like me... so what? My toon looks like a dang paladin chick with a 2H sword -- what more do you want outta life?
-Loth

Yeah, I've seen some bandit chiefs use plate. East of Markarth and south of DawnStar, I've been to a few forts with bandits, sorry that I can remember the names off-hand right now.




And thanks Fleapants, I've entered the formulas into an excel, and I think I better understand them! I'm gonna be tinkering with them since I wanna make a Lightly Armored, Dual Wielding Altmer adventurer and I didn't want to invest too much into Alchemy and Enchanting early on, and I want to stay at Adept and above for difficulty.

Yes it works well , also , just a few days after release i found the Penitus Oculatus helmet (if you loot it , neat the end of the DB guild questline ) also allows to wear the circlet and be enchanted in whatever you want . I didn't verify if the patches fixed it since

I pretty sure its still glitched as of 1.3.

Maybe you guys know this and maybe you don't. I wanted to ask and see though. While there is a cap on armor, there is no such cap on weapons, correct?

So it's in my best interest to get the most powerful bow and arrow set I can and enchant and improve the crap out of it, right?

If so, what's the best bow in the game?

What about swords?

There is no damage cap.

The best bow is daedric, if you count "best" as doing the most damage per your current smithing skill, but arrows also contribute to damage (as I'm sure you already know). Thing is, with the +smithing gear you can make any bow kick-ass in damage especially if you sneak, so IMO the best bow is the one you think looks the coolest on your char.

I love 1H swords... same logic applies to swords as bows, but I will warn you that if you stick to using a bound sword (from the conjuration spell) it will get outleveled by enemies after a while, as you can't improve it on a blacksmith's grindstone like a normal sword. You can get a mod to add perks to the bound weapon perk Mystic Binding that fixes this.
-Loth

Adding onto Lothario's post...

Assuming you're going with our previous recommendations (Elven Smithing, no Alchemy, etc.), Elven weapons will work just fine. You can 2-3 shot Alduin with almost any type of weapon, so you might as well use the type you're already specialized for. You could go for Daedric, but that would require an extra 4 perk points in Smithing, and the higher damage would be kinda pointless.

What do you mean no alchemy? As in not use fortify one handed potions or not using the skill at all?

Also, what would you spend those 4 extra perks in since youre already mostly immune to damage and can dish out enough damage to kill anything in a few strikes? Furthermore, what do you enchant on your weapons since elemental damage would be redundant.

This is a little off topic but when doing "getavinfo damageresist" on my followers it turns out the game sets their current armor rating to ridiculously negative values even though i give them a full set of legendary daedric gear, -9200 for lydia and -2300 for vilkas after 600+ from gear. this certainly explains why they still get one shoted by giants while i take only marginal damage but was this intended or merely a bug? Shadowmere is the only one that does not seems affected and has an armor rating that is actually positive.

I was only referring to the crafting process, so "no alchemy" means no Alchemy perks (and thus no +130% Smithing potion), with a store-bought +50% Smithing potion instead.


Utility. You should already be armor capped, MR capped, and hopefully have crafted a weapon that does sufficient damage without completely trivializing the game (if avoiding that is your goal, of course), so there's little point in going for more offense or defense. Alaston's making a sneaky archer, so I'd recommend Pickpocket for starters.


Very odd. Definitely needs further testing.

Still crossing my fingers that someone releases an enhanced difficulty or revamped scaling mod to make all these efforts meaningful and rewarding instead of game breaking.

In the meantime I have my altmer spell sword to something like: 10/80/10 magicka/health/stamina
85% MR, 80% DR, 50% SA (with atronach stone), 100% reduction in destruction spells, and the rest into stamina/magicka regen or elemental resists. With so many perks open I might actually invest in the other spell school for some fun crowd control or even get 30% more SA from perks.

Don't worry... as soon as CK is out (probably within a half an hour of release) there will be 5+ mods for this, all of them slightly different from each other.
-Loth

thanks to all! great work! just to read trough all the number crunching is a pleasure and valuable information!

about decaping and finishers
Question first .. is there any other way to get good test results? other than to run around alone on tgm killing everything that moves?

There are two global vars that I expect to do something with chance on finishers: killmoverandom (default 50) and decapitationchance (default 40). After perking 25% and decap chance these globals don't get touched. So my guess is that they are global base chance for anything that can fight. Just for the fun of it I set killmoverandom to 1 and decapitationchance to 100. I thought that might do the trick to get a decap spree on anything or vice-versa.

But so far there is nothing that tells if those globals do that. with those settings there is no 100% finishing chance on every encounter. Also nothing did decap my testchar might be godmode related though.
Out of all encounters with a finishing it always was the last opponent of the fight. Further more if it was a creature like bears or spiders it was a killingmove and if it was a humanoid like guards or bandits it was a decapmove.
finishing a creature seems to be only involving a killingmove even if they might have a "decapable" head like giants or falmer. To verify that .. well more science needs to be done! in way more killing single and multiple encounters.

testing on PC with lvl 38 one-hander char with one-handed perked up to the decap chance perk and running arround for one hour.

I have to get to work now but maybe this info helps someone.

I would love to get the finishers disabled. they are fun, the first 5 times. But they tend to ruin some really hard encounters: to get instagibed on full health, OOM, 2 to 4 seconds to go to get fus-ro-dah out after 30mins into the fight .. well is fun one time. After reloading a save and seeking out the elder dragon that just instagibed me .. and .. well get chewed again about 4 times in about 3 hours hard fighting AND similar situation full health .. isn't fun or bad luck. After that I hit bed and in the morning the forums writing this .. 8)

With a little more testing (use getavinfo damageresist) it seems that followers "permanently" lose an armor rating if you hit them marked for death. This was why my lydia had -22000 and vigilance had -55333. I have been able to somewhat fix it by using modav damage resist but it would obviously become tedious after a while. This seems like a crippling bug and was somehow missed during testing.

Armor rating or damage resist is expressed generally as a base value with modifiers added on to it they are:

temp, perm, damage

each death seems to set the damage modifier to -value equal to health. using the above console will allow you to set the perm to a positive value to cancel out damage but the long term effects are unknown and again, rather tedious unless you just ignore that shout.

Ok... Now taking my OP-as-all-getout Breton for a little test:

Inside Breezehome, spawning my very own Bandit Chief, using player.placeatme ff001afe (this is the last ID in the list if you search "bandit chief"... for me it spawned a guy in full steel plate with a Dwarven Greatsword). Selecting him and typing getavinfo twohanded, I see his skill level is 79. I also did addperk 52d52 to give him the Devastating Blow perk (I got confirmation that it was added, seeming to indicate that he might not have had it already? Not sure about this). Finally, I did player.setav health 10000 as suggested, and against my better instincts, drew no weapons...

And this was all worthless, because he was immediately set upon by Lydia and my loving husband Vilkas, who together made short work of him. I forgot my house was so crowded, LOL.

So then I fast-traveled to the Lord Stone. Thankfully I didn't have any followers, but Frost the horse appeared with me, so I rode him off away from the place and came back and spawned another Bandit Chief, same stuff again...

My full health at this point is actually 10118, so I do a player.setav health 9882 to make it an even 10000. He hit me once with a regular attack. It did no damage to me, but he was damaged instead (darn Ebony Mail), and yelled "Victory is yours! I submit!" and ran off to hide behind a tree. So I gave myself a normal Ebony Armor and switched equipment. Now he started attacking, but he's not taking away any health at all, and is alternating between blocking and power attacking.

Test is ongoing...

Edit: Okay, 20 minutes was enough. He was in fact damaging me (a whopping 30-ish points) but my regen rate is high enough that it barely registered. He did manage to stagger me a fair bit of the time, but no decapping. BUT. I did a getlevel on him, and his level was 28, and the character I was testing this on is level 50, so I'll try again later with a lower level character.

LOL @ Sparrow's testing hijinks.
-Loth

Tried again with my level 29 High Elf... With light armor, and a considerably lower skill level in armor, she did actually get damaged enough to chip away at her health (power attacks doing 200-300 damage instead of 30-50) but otherwise nothing different. Well, except that the code I used to spawn the Bandit Chief in my other game didn't work in this one and I had to look up a new one.

Since my health was actually going down (albeit slowly) this time, I was going to wait to see if the last swing would decap, but somebody else wants to play Skyrim if I'm just going to stand around (he said when he saw the screen start spinning with a bandit still swinging away at me as I stood there)...

Thanks, Sparrow... it looks like decap is not an instakill, but a different kill animation after all. So the non-cosmetic bonus from the perk is just +25% damage to standing power attacks. Good work!
-Loth

I am vindicated! Thanks for testing this, Sparrow.

+25% on standing power attacks is still well-worth 1 perk point if you need more damage.

Yup... I'm still going to get it!
-Loth

Just for clarification on my part.

I have a breton 2h (using a battleaxe) warrior wearing light armor.

To reach the armor cap I need 2 perks in elven (assume I'll stay elven) smithing. 5/5 Agile defender and I'll reach armor cap that way correct?

If I want to get max block as well I need to go 4/5 Shieldwall if I don't mind using a fortify block enchant, otherwise I need 5/5 correct?