I mean, you do NOT have to be a "powergamer" to want your character's perk choices to be well spent and have a good character. And it also bears noting that even though one view to take when planning a character is the long term end and which 50 or 75 perks you want, the experience of playing will be one perk at a time. There is another more immediate view that asks if you want your character to have certain abilities or perks at say level five, or when you gain a few more and are able to do this quest or that one. So is it wrong to want to make each level's perk selection count? If not, then picking a perk that gives you something practical and useful is even more significant each time. What you give up to get what you really need kind of does force the question, what do I absolutely need? If several perks are easily dumped from that list, even for a type of character that normally would use them, that speaks to bad design.

I agree that the skill's use itself may be so easy to learn as to invalidate the need for perks to be effective, even without a skeleton key. It certainly did in Oblivion. One had only to learn the trick to when the tumbler would stick (following it's faster fall), and once you understood it, the skill itself was useless. I routinely picked very hard locks and hard ones right out of the tutorial dungeon without breaking but one or two picks. My first destination was usually Fort Farragut's hidden hollow tree entrance to get the regenerating barrel of ten poison apples for money. A very hard lock? Such a thing does not exist in Oblivion. Only locks with different number of tumblers.

What the hell kind of Thief has less than 100 lockpick?

all of them? up to the point where they get their skill to 100. Sorry I'm an ass.

Until that point they're not a capital T thief, they're just capable amateurs.

This just in: the One-Handed Weapon perks are also all useless, since you can kill everything in the game without them. Don't waste your points!

edit: nevermind

This seems rather like a powergamer issue than a roleplaying issue.

Exactly. There's a surprising number of people that say particular races/skills/perks etc. are great/worthless only on the merit of being more or less powerful at maximum level. I never understood this in oblivion either. If you're at max level you're going to be killing anything in your path anyways, pretty much regardless of what choices you make up until that point. Once you've got your deadric armour/ring of perfection/a gazillion ridiculous weapons even a gimped character can become powerful again.

It's the levels in between that matter.

yeah, I mean, you can roleplay a master thief who obtains his wealth through his skill in stealing, who can replicate keys in wax, who can pick a master lock with poor mans lockpick. You can play a master swordsman, who can take down a dragon using a wooden sword, a mage so powerful he can kill you with a thought.

Or you can play an ordinary average citizen, who has somehow acquired the 8 wonders of the world, and so can achieve greatness through them. This is a legitimate roleplaying option.

The skeleton key doesn't make you a master lockpicker, it makes you an ordinary person who has acquired an extraordinary item. If you aren't interested in being a master lockpicker, well yeah lockpicking is useless. I can also learn to use fireballs, or I can acquire a staff that does it for me.

Is it just an unbreakable lockpick? Or is it a lockpick that auto opens everything? The reason i'm asking is because if it's unbreakable... and you can get it early on, you can powerlevel your lockpicking to 100 with it. Lockpicking is advanced for each attempt, whether you're successful or not. So, if you get the skeleton key early on, go find a master lock and then just sit there and fail over and over and over and over... you'll eventually reach 100 without ever actually having to try and opening a lock.

I still plan on getting the lockpicking perks to make picking locks easier as well as the added treasure and gold so hopefully my method will work.

It's an unbreakable lockpick. I've seen a screenshot of it being used in the mini-game.

Ok so after so many pages, do we know if we loose the key after the end of the Thieves guild quest line?

Bump!

This forum suffers from some of the worst reading comprehension I've ever come across.

Lockpicking as a skill is not worthless, but from a rational perspective in assessing whether or not one should use their limited perks on that skill, the answer is obvious. One can save their limited amount of perks on different skills to construct a stronger character, while using a skeleton key to unlock chests and such. But if some would want to use their perks on that skill, go ahead, it's just not the smartest thing to do, however.

And for those that casually chime in and say "well, you don't have to use it, man," yeah no s***. That's obvious. This is a forum, where all what people mostly do is anolyze and critique (as people should always do). Comments like those don't provide any argument or anything of value to the discussion.

First I'd point out that Bethesda screwed the pooch on locks again to begin with. In the first game play video I saw today there was a lock that said, "This lock cannot be picked. You must have a key."

That's stupid. There's no such thing. Either give the skill or don't give the skill, but don't pretend to give the skill.

If half the area of the game world were covered in a "magic free" cloud, the mages would be absolutely insane over it, especially since it's pretty much guaranteed that these would be the places they really wanted to be able to cast magic.

Every time they really wanted to cast a spell, they'd just get a little note that said, "Thanks for all your hard work, idiot, but you simply aren't allowed to use magic here, even though this is one spot you really, really want to. Have a nice day!"

That's just irritating. It's stupid. It's amazing to me how we limit real life concepts (picking locks, swinging swords) but empower fictional concepts simply because the fact that they're totally imaginary means they are boundless in our conceptions.

It's poor game design.




Secondly, the picking mini game is stupid beyond stupid to begin with.

I pick locks in real life. It's fun. I've picked thousands of locks. Thousands of them. Know how many picks I've broken?

Zero.

I still have my starter set that cost 7 bucks and came with 5 picks and two torsion wrenches, all completely unscathed aside from small scratches and wear.

The mini game is stupid, and I'm better at picking locks in real life than I am at those stupid mini games. The mini games svck!

I happened to love spamming the Hell out of the auto-pick button in Oblivion, because it was a better alternative than that stupid mini game.

Just getting that out there.




It depends on how stealth works this time around.


Good answer. Some of us like good items. Still, it's a 50% increase to the base so when all is said and done, it's 1/3rd of the total chance of finding said items. At the end of the day, is that even going to be worth it given the caps that they place on certain items and magical affects?


Or some of us just thought it was stupider than Hell. Either or.


No, you can't pick anything. Not in this game. In real life there's no such thing as a lock that can't be picked, but in Oblivion/Skyrim, there is.



As someone said above, so is using a sword and using an axe. So is casting a stamina spell and a damage spell. Yet if we were talking about those kinds of restrictions on magic, a lot of people in this thread that are being very rigid and unrelenting would be absolutely furious at how they just got screwed.




That's not broken. That's how it works in real life.