Well... That's what I do. I prioritize casting a spell over popping a potion.

I always loved OOO's HoT potions, and i intend to get a mod that changes them to that as soon as one comes out. Waiting till you're at 2 health and healing yourself fully is...bothersome.

At high levels dungeons get populated with "ultimate health potions" that "heal all your HP" no matter how big your pool is.

What? My magicka can fully heal me and recharge between the time a dragon takes off and the time it lands again.

Not even fast-travel makes the time it takes to stock up on potions reasonable in comparison. I can't even afford potions or the ingredients to make them, because I'm too busy buying ingots/ores, magic disenchantable items, soul gems, or ingredients with unknown effects. Sometimes I can buy lots of Minor Healing potions...

But, I'm a "thoughtless" player: I charge in, smack everything with my sword until my enemies are dead, or I'm forced to run away and heal up again... or I die, at which point I run in and smack everything I can with my sword until everyone's dead (Repeating re-load as necessary)

Potions are expensive and heavy, best used in emergencies. Healing Spells are nigh-unlimited and free.

Skyrim too easy? Don't do it. Soon you will have a rule book longer than the game manual. To have a challenge you have to ignore half the game!!!

I exaggerate but wouldn't be much better for developers to start putting the challenge back in gaming. I love skyrim, but I can't wait for the CK to be released.

No, Beth should stay with their choice of allowing the PLAYER to choose rather than following other companies and removing ANY choice while forcing the player to play according to some developer's idea of "balance."

Not much point in them following the crowd. That isn't what has made them a successful company.

Also, I stick with role playing, so my character has 100 health.

Because people are pointing out your inability to have the least bit of self-control in a game that gives you a great deal of choice in how you want to play.

Just because you can't exercise restraint or self-control doesn't mean that someone else should have to have his ability to choose be diminished.

Maybe you should just wait for a mod so that you can spend more time on playing the game as you want instead of fixating and focusing on such a small detail compared to the rest of what there is in the game.

This forum is so full of people who cannot seem to ever come close to seeing the forest for the trees, right now.

That's the point though: If you don't find it fun, you can simply not do it. Other people may not find it fun to have to reload because their potions were on cooldown. What you want can be achieved without any changes to the game, and does not impose limitations on others, since you can simply forgo the use of potions. As it is right now, you can skip potions and people who want to spam potions can do so. Win-win.

(I don't use fast travel because I feel it ruins the immersion. But I'm not making threads and ask Bethesda to limit the use of it for others. Why would I? I don't have to fast travel.)

Dragon Age is a good example of how difficulty levels were done better than the norm. It's sad they still have difficulty just scaling health and damage but it should instead change some game mechanics. Potion loot amount and potion use should have been limited by difficulty level among many other things. There are gamers, like me, who like to min/max in a game and it's gaming bliss when you can play your possible best within game limits and still have a hard time. This games difficulty is easily broken which means you have to ignore several imbalanced parts of the game.

Summary: I want mastery difficulty to take a lot of preparation and smart game play, using every trick available to make the game playable on the hardest level. What we have now doesn't allow this game style.

It's all good there will be a balance mod in the upcoming future for us PC gamers. Will probably add a 20 second or so delay timer inbetween potion usage so you can't just stop time and drink repeatedly to full, then you will be happy you have a resto spell as backup.

Im level 40 and have about 50 extreme and vigorous healing potions in my inventory. I find them so quickly I wont make it to use them. With my next character I'll just ignore potions completely. Annoying and overpowered. I keep finding a potion in every chest.

The Witcher did potions really well. You dont have time to start drinking down a dozen potions while a draugr is bashing you with an axe. Drinking potions should at least have an animation and take some time to have an effect.

Indeed and if Bethesda was on their game and truly wanted to incorporate "Master Difficulty" tthat was unique, they could have disallowed Fast Travel, Add item decay and make rulesets for potion use so you couldn't spam drink it in mid combat but ONLY opens up for those playing on Master difficulty. Instead they took the simplistic approach by merely adding npc hitpoints and damage meters.

Both restoration and potions are pointless as you magically always regenerate health.

THIS!

If only there was a hardcoe mode in the game. In addition to all those things it should have crippled limbs, very lethal combat, food and drink needs etc. I dont understand why most developers think that difficulty=more hitpoints. More hitpoints only makes it tedious and boring. Add challenge, not tedium.

Well, that's what a game is. Certain things should not be at the whim of the player in a game - otherwise it ceases to be a game. What's the difference between being able to decide whether or not I want to die in a fight and arbitrarily deciding how good my current armor is. Why can't I just choose how good it is? That way I could make it worse if I wanted more of a challenge and make it really, really good when I don't.

No, and I'd argue that not doing that is also not what has made them a successful company. I'm not sure what this has to do with the discussion.

Hehe...you completely missed the point. I make this same observation about every Bethesda game I've ever played (and I've played them all...I even played Arena the day it was released in 1994). Why are some people unable to have a rational discussion about something without going into defense mode when they don't agree with something? Nobody (except maybe the OP) is "fixating" on anything. This is just a discussion.

Anyway, it has nothing to do with self-control. Sure, I can limit my potion use...it's not hard. It has to do with the game deciding if it's a game or a sandbox, because a game has clearly-defined rules, and a sandbox doesn't. I enjoy aspects of both, but in the case of health management Bethesda tends to put game mechanics in direct contention with sandbox qualities, and the result is (in my opinion) less satisfying than a hard-and-fast rule in this case. The player shouldn't have to decide whether or not they're going to die during a fight based on how they want their own personal health mechanic to work. Again, that's just my opinion, and again, I'm not complaining. We're just having a conversation here, and the "stop whining" and "you have no self-control" comments really don't contribute much when framed as flamebait.

Restoration - Novice, regeneration, recovery 1 and 2 plus respite can be useful especially earlier in the game.


Potions are more a get out of jail card as you can take them multiple times and instantly. Potions also tend to take up a lot of space if you rely on them too heavily.

To be honest, I'm a little tired of people saying "just don't do it then" for everything. I'm ok restricting myself in some cases such as not grinding smithing, but restricting from everything just to be able to have fun? Don't grind any skill, don't double enchant an item, don't use potions, don't use a good dagger on your sneaky assassin, don't upgrade items to legendary...

This is seriously looking more like Second Life or a sim game than an actual RPG with goals and challenges to overcome. Seems that creating sandbox games is pretty easy since you don't need to balance anything. If someone is having difficulty to have fun it's his fault alone for not knowing how to play it.

Part of the an open ended game like skyrim is the fact that we have so many options to go about healing...
When u start to ask for limitations on one thing you start to change what the game is..
Why do u think that when u go from adept difficulty to master
The only thing that changes is the health and damage?
Because bethesda has spent years refining the open sandbox RPG
They walk a thin rope of what can be limited and what cant be changed
When u add monster hunter style potion consumption you limit what potion dependent melee fighters can use...thus funneling the experience And not allowing for true open gameplay
Why do you think bethesda releases a mod kit?
So ppl who want to limit the game can do so without F'ing up everyone elses experience
If bethesda actually listened to your gripes about something u thought about for 2 minutes
and immediately thought was dumb, even though bethesda has thought about this stuff for years and actually know, i would be furious if they actually limited potions in that way...
It makes a tunnel and restricts the players options....
Thats not what a bethesda game is about and its wierd when a developer tries to limit the
player in a TES and Fallout property (looking at you New Vegas)

Is that why perks are given in limited numbers, player have limited hp/magicka/stamina pool, with weapons also having certain damages built into them? Player restriction on anything that's not blatant cheating through consoles/glitches is just poor really devoted fan defense for some mistakes that Bethesda made in their game design. And OP was not asking for restrictions, rather more refined system where choices have benefits and consequences, not just "X is always better than Y".

Having broken balance didn't make them a successful company. The open world theme with rich lore did.


Nobody is asking for potions to be useless so stop with strawman where potions become useless and the choice becomes absent.

We just want the choices to present more fair opportunity. Right now most of these "LOL DON'T DO IT" response ignores that one choice is blatantly way more powerful than others.

Ask anyone who has the game that isnt a forum member here what they think about the oblivion crisis and how its effecting the altmer's eventual reign over mer

Thier correct response will be "what?....im just playin skyrim...that game with dragons and where u shoot fire out of your hand and theres this cool part where i saw someone get decapitated..."

No.....TES games didnt get popular from lore....they got popular because ppl like open world medival games with swords magick and dragons.....not how the great war effected race relations with nords and elves....

Just for sake of argument ok lore is irrelevent (despite all those threads on this forum about the lore). Open world still does not mean broken balance among choices. If anything, broken balance among choices deter experimentation because something is always going to be better.

Close wounds and equilibrium saves tons of carrying space.

That's exactly what people are complaining about, though. Choice.

You don't just make the choice to not make yourself overpowered. You make the choice to not make yourself use a significant chunk of the options within the game.

This perspective isn't a threat toward your enjoyment of the game. A Diablo-style hack and slash is a perfectly legitimate. What people are complaining about is that even on master the inherent imbalance among the skill-sets limits peoples' choice of how to play the game if they want to maintain a rewarding level of challenge - something that is entirely subjective, mind. These are not two mutually exclusive ideals. You can have your cake, and they can eat it too... but you need balance among the different skills, and a more effective way to scale the difficulty via the slider.

Agree 100% with the OP. I realized after my first two characters trying really hard to find ANY redeeming value out of healing through Restoration that it's entirely worthless.

-You don't need it when not in combat.
-When in combat it's way too slow to ever be worth it, and to actually use it you have to run away and hide behind objects.
-Healing potions are everywhere.

Restoration healing is pretty pathetic, but it should not even be compared to Destruction since they are not used for a similar purpose at all. Both are awful in this game though.

Blatantly way more powerful?..............
The potions system, just like the restoration tree, is as balanced as it can be because
If u actually thought about it for a second
If i was a warrior who never out into alchemy or restoration how would i effectively heal myself if there werent potions that healed large amounts of health for me to find?
If they didnt have "ultimate" potions or whatever then it would become law to waste perk points into restoration or alchemy regardless of what build u wanted to make...or else you would be stuck hauling around 500 minor healing potions....bethesda makes the game in the mindset that u have to cater to all styles and this happens to be a valid scenario in the gamespace....
Is it overpowered at the rate they throw potions at you? Yes it is....for someone who has put points into restoration it may seem that way....but that is as balnced as they can make it man....u have to understand that.....they have mods so ppl can use tweaks to contour to THEIR playstyle.....when u have to please EVERYONE u make choices like these because as of right now they are the BEST option.....only thing i can see now is if for TES 6 the menu doesnt pause the world anymore.....