I'm having a problem planning out my stealth-based character, basically there doesn't seem to be enough perks to go around.

I'd like to build a character than can assassinate up close and plink with a bow, make potions for himself, be generally sneaky and stealy and throw out trixy illusion spells when things get heated. I want to be able to keep the difficulty at a minimum of adept for the most part.




ARCHERY: 16 perks, they're all too good to pass up.

LIGHT ARMOR: 10 perks, need them all to stay alive at higher level/difficulty.

SNEAK: 13 perks, need them all.

PICKPOCKET: 12, need them all

ALCHEMY: 15 perks, need them all to be as effective as possible

ILLUSION: 13 perks, want them all

SPEECH: 13 perks, want them all

LOCKPICKING: 11 Perks, would like to have these all, but I guess I can play without them

ONE-HANDED: 21 Perks, only need Armsman 5/5 and preferably Dual Flurry 2/2 and Dual Savagery (8 perks wanted)


Obviously I can't max all of these perk trees, and there's absolutely no flexibility to specialize in swords as well as daggers. There are one hundred and eleven perks here. I only get eighty-one, and I only get easy access to fifty before leveling starts to slow down. I just find it really disappointing that I have to deep specialize my sneaky character, but it's the truth. I guess I start looking for stuff to cut.


Basically, I have to leave out lockpicking, speech, illusion and half of something else to make everything fit. I just wanted to hit up the community to get some recommendations for fun builds.

First off, I like that you have to specialize characters. And here is some advice from someone that has played 90 hours as a sneak thief assassin and beat the main quest line and numerous others:

1. Speech isn't needed for this type of build. At all. All it does is save you money, and you'll get plenty of gold from stealing and pickpocketing people, not to mention dungeon delves. Every conversation I encountered with Speech options could be by-passed by bribing the NPC. If you were thinking of this for the Fence option, joining the Thieves Guild gives you all the fences you'll ever need, and honestly, I constantly had tens of thousands more gold than I knew what to do with. All those stolen gems get laundered quite nicely if you mix them with some gold and sell the resulting jewelry to any merchant.

2. The Lockpicking skill tree has some nice perks, but they are mostly unneeded. Wax Key for example is next to worthless, as you can easily just steal the real key or keep picking locks in the building or house. The perk that lets you pick locks without being noticed (Quick Hands, I think) is also stupid, as all it does is mean you don't have to Hide to pick locks any more. A waste of a perk. The perk Locksmith is nice (it starts the pick near the correct position) but by the time you can get it you have so many lockpicks and are so good all it does is save you a miniscule amount of time. The perk to have unbreakable lockpicks sounds awesome, but by the time you can get it you will have hundreds of lockpicks. Again, not worth it. The only perks worth getting in the tree are the main ones that make certain levels of locks easier to pick, and you can stop at Expert level with those, because you'll never encounter Master locks often enough to make the perk for that level worth it. So that's only 4 perks you should put in the Lockpicking skill tree, not 11.

3. The Sneak skill tree is almost all worth having, except the last perk, Shadow Warrior. It never works often or well enough to be worth having, and by the time you get to 100 Sneak you'll already have developed plenty of effective strategies for when your cover is blown.

4. For Pickpocket you don't need Key Master, because seriously - keys are easy as hell to pickpocket by the time you have 60 skill in Pickpocket. And you don't need the last skill, Perfect Touch, but I guess it could be useful in limited circumstances, I just never found them. After all, if you are going to focus on Poisons with Alchemy and Pickpocketing poisons into the enemy or NPCs pockets, their armor is going to do jack and nothing for them.

5. Now, I was playing at Adept Difficulty, but I never needed any Light Armor perks. As a sneak thief, if you've been seen or caught you've screwed up. Besides with the spells at your disposal in the illusion school it will be easy to get other enemies to tank for you, fight each other, or simply disappear again for more sneak attacks. I doubt you really need this. The build you are going for really isn't meant for toe-to-toe combat. With your Alchemy perks you should be rolling in Healing Potions anyway.

6. Speaking of Alchemy, you probably only need to go up the poison side of the tree if you want, but all the perks are useful.

7. Finally, One-Handed. I know the dual-wielding sounds cool, but the truth of it is that you are probably going to get very little use out of it with this build. Once Archery is maxed, you can back-pedal quickly while shooting, fire quickly, slow time, stagger your opponents with nearly every arrow, and paralyze them a good chunk of the time. Archery is so super viable for melee combat at that point that you'll never use anything else. And even up until then - a single dagger is all you'll get the x15 sneak attack bonus on - two quick swings from one dagger versus two for the same damage. And an arrow in the back is just as effective up close as a dagger is in a lot of circumstances. Five ranks in Armsman I can see as a very good investment, but none of the rest.

There. Now hopefully you see you'll have more than enough perks.

Highly disagree with this. I use a sword in the right and a dagger in the left on my Assassin. With the DW perks and the +25% power attack perk you do +75% damage on a sneak attack power attack. With this power attack you have a dagger that does 15x dam and a sword that does 6x dam, effectively allowing you to one shot just about anything from sneak. I play on Master and I can one shot everything. Not to mention if you do the hold power attack you can usually get in a couple extra sneak crits. Archery simply isn't viable for me on Master.

Again, you're actually just agreeing with me. I didn't say dual-wielding and one-handed perks weren't effective or useful. I just said he wasn't going to get much out of them with his build.

Again, I find you can go either Archery or One-handed on a sneak assassin build - but doing both is just wasteful of perks. If he wants to max all of Archery like he said, he'll end up never using the dual-wielding perks at all. And I don't know what difficultly level he wants to play on, but I found Archery to be continuously devastating on Adept. Like I said, the fact that you stagger opponents, slow time, and PARALYZE them with your arrows pretty well means the end of everything you encounter.

So, dual-wielded is fine yes. But not if you are doing archery. You really need to pick one or the other.

Alright, I guess we are agreeing with each other. Maybe that is why I felt Archery svcking, because I wasn't really devoting the proper perks into it.

Your focusing on too many skills first off.

The problem I'm seeing there is, with your full investment in Light Armor and One-handed trees, you're trying to create A Warrior/Thief, not a "pure" thief or even Assassin-Thief.

You're trying to maximize your character in all undertakings, which doesn't work out. There are many different kinds of Stealth-based characters: figure out which one you really want to be and design your perks around that.

You don't need to max out all Archery perks: that's a job for dedicated Martial Archers. Assassins/sneaks don't need that kind of awesome archery ability.

Twenty-one perks into one-handed? What are you trying to pull there? You don't need the melee combat ability of a Whirlwind Berzerker of Death to be a sneak.

What I see here is you trying to be a Master Thief, Assassin, Archer, and Berzerker all at once. That's not going to work.

After playing as thief/assassin/ranger for 90h+ on Master difficulty, I'd recommend putting perks into these skills:

Archery - everything except maybe time slow, but this is personal preference. Amount of target leading won't change, you'll just have more time to adjust your aim.

Light Armor - useless, my skill in this tree is still at 50, because of how rarely I get hit.

Sneak - best tree by far, but first perk isn't necessary to max out. 2 or 3 ranks should be enough.

Pickpocket - not needed at all, although extra carrying capacity could come in handy.

One-Handed - Armsman, Dual Flurry (1 point), Dual Savagery


Everything else is completely optional (I'd go with 1 crafting tree, either Smithing or Enchanting, but definitely not both because they work TOO WELL together. After that, probably Speech and a few perks in Pickpocket for carrying capacity. Of course you will still have to level those skills if you want to increase your character level at reasonable speed after you start hitting 35+, but putting perks into them is not needed at all.

Visual representation of the skills that I deem necessary (req lvl: 31) - http://www.ign.com/builds/the-elder-scrolls-5-skyrim/create?d=00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000005000000011511110311000000000000000211111111

Yup:
ARCHERY: 16 perks, they're all too good to pass up.

Kinda:
LIGHT ARMOR: 10 perks, need them all to stay alive at higher level/difficulty.
SNEAK: 13 perks, need them all.

Nope:
LOCKPICKING: 11 Perks, would like to have these all, but I guess I can play without them
ONE-HANDED: 21 Perks, only need Armsman 5/5 and preferably Dual Flurry 2/2 and Dual Savagery (8 perks wanted)

U mad bro?:
PICKPOCKET: 12, need them all
ALCHEMY: 15 perks, need them all to be as effective as possible
ILLUSION: 13 perks, want them all
SPEECH: 13 perks, want them all

I have more money and more potions than I'll ever use so Alchemy and Speech are totally not needed. Speech raises just fine on it's on really. Illusion? Huh? I've never pickpocketed anyone, never had to. If you're not playing an archer I guess I can see the armor and one hand stuff and the rest of sneak.



That seems wrong, like you have perks in Archery which require 100 skill but you only have 60 skill in Archery?

I actually use both bows and duel daggers just fine. I only have one perk in one-handed though, I just put poison on my daggers if I need to kill something fast, I also think that armsman is not really needed. I have 1 point in the skill and along with the perk that gives x15 dagger damage in sneak I nearly one hit a dragon on expert, felt kinda bad afterwards...

I like using bows but find I have to be careful with killing with them, having a another place to hide after a shoot because the first usually doesn't kill and alerts everything in the area. Using a power attack with two daggers has nearly killed every strong enemy I've encountered so far.

I also don't have any perks in light armor, I just try to not get hit: watch enemy attack patterns, hide when discovered, etc.

On my bosmer assassin, I've actually found shadow warrior immensely useful. The momentary flash of invisibility it grants upon entering stealth has allowed me to assassinate enemies in the middle of combat, sprint to cover, hide again, roll back out, and assassinate again, over and over until the fight ends. Shadow Warrior makes massive fights much easier and keeps me from having to stay in the fight and risk more than a minimal amount of damage. I've found, actually, that with a maxed sneak perk tree, I don't even need to use my light armor, as I very rarely get hit.

Talent calculator seems to be bugged and doesn't show required skill levels properly.

Personally (playing a sneak archer myself) I'd forgo Illusion and 1-handed for starters - if as a sneak archer anything gets close enough for you to need any 1-handed perks, you're doing it wrong. Similarly if you want to backstab, forgo the archery skill tree. Concentrate on one or the other, whichever suits your playstyle best, and use the other as back up without putting perks into it. In other words, either be a great archer, or a great melee/backstabber - there isn't room to perk up both, just pick one and stick to it. By all means advance your skill in more than one, but only put perks into your preferred combat method.

Sneak goes without saying, I'm an extremely effective sneak at skill level 100 with all perks but the shadow master taken - this is the primary skill for any sneaky character, obviously. Because you will be relying on sneak to pick off enemies one at a time, or attack then retreat and hide.

Also as a sneak character I play it as "hit once and run away to hide" and therefore any armour skill is secondary - you need to hit hard and effectively on the first strike (whether by arrow or blade) then hide, if you get hit back, you're doing it wrong. Have potions handy for if things go [censored] up or if you need to fortify a skill, or poisons at the ready if you need a bit more oomph for your first strike when facing a tough foe.

Which brings us to Alchemy. It's handy to be able to make the best potions and poisons (and these items may well be your way out of a bad situation if it goes wrong), I have to say though that I can make fairly decent stuff without any perks in the alchemy tree, and I had enough money after the first few levels to not worry about paying for potions and poisons because I had more money than I could spend. But having great poisons especially is useful as a sneak based character, and invisibility potions can come in real handy if you're in a bind! But certainly don't concentrate on putting perks into any more than 1 of the crafting skills.

Speech is one of those things that you don't really need for any build, but you might want it for roleplaying purposes. The barter side of the tree doesn't mean much when merchants have so little money and the perk to give them more money doesn't actually help that much (because by the time you can take that perk you probably already have more money than you know what to do with). The persuade side of the tree might help you in certain limited situations, but again it's not going to make or break any particular situation in my experience. I do however take Speech for roleplaying purposes, as I see my current character as more of a smooth-talking bard type rogue than a silent assassin, so in roleplay terms taking Speech makes sense.

Pickpocket and lockpick are up to you - pickpocket is probably more worthwhile because it's totally % based, if you plan to pick pockets then take 2 or 3 ranks of the first perk to give you a better chance, but most of the higher up perks on the tree seem fairly useless - I have taken 2 ranks of the first perk and can steal most things that I might need with a 90% chance which is pretty good. Lockpicking depends upon whether you find the mini-game easy or difficult, I just cannot get the hang of it at all so have perked out the main branch of lockpicking (ignoring the side branches) just to make it easier to play the thief I wanted to be! - but if you can do the mini-game without perks then no need.

Edit to add: Sorry about triggering the autocensor, I didn't realise that would be viewed as a bad thing, it's not viewed as offensive here in the UK and even my mum says it and she's really prudish! My apologies.

I'm building a stealthy/marksmen/duel wielding warrior, focusing perks on archery, one handed, sneak, and smithing.

I'm not looking to max out all three. (I think I only need seven from sneak as matter of fact)

He's a sniper/warrior build, not a true thief build. He can pick'em off, but if they wanna get in his face or if he gets pissed off and wants to charge, he can roll that way too. Sorta like a ranger/sniper build from FO3.

So far so good.

Its just like FO, anything works if you're smart about perks.

Thanks so much for the assistance and advice chaps, this is exactly what I needed.

My revised perk distribution is looking something like this:

ARCHERY: all 16
ALCHEMY: 15
ONE-HANDED: 5
LIGHT ARMOR: 5
SNEAK: 13
ILLUSION: 13
LOCKPICK: 5
PICKPOCKET: 7

This gives me two points to fiddle around with, and I'm on a PC so I can always rearrange via console if I have to. I'm thinking the final two perks will go into 1-handed dual flurry. If I need more perks I can start taking them out of alchemy.

Word of advice...after you're done getting the skills you use frequently to 100 (let's say ~5 of them) you'll be a lot closer to level 50 than the 79 (!) you seem to have there.

This. Good grief man. You can't count on 79 perks! That is what you would have if you maxed EVERY skill to 100. Which, let me tell you, will take somewhere around 200 hours.

I have 90 hours of game time (and I don't dawdle around picking flowers) and I only have 40 perks! You need to lose about 30 perks or more from that planned build, buddy.

I agree, drop 1 handed, light armour, and illusion, and don't take all the alchemy perks is my advice.