Has anyone noticed that certain skills are practically worthless at low levels, even when your character is at low levels?

Take low level enchanting, for example; you can either enchant an item for 4% fire resistance, or you can keep the 30% fire resistance boots your found in a ruin. I have yet to level my enchanting high enough to overcome the boost provided by those boots...but those boots have practically no armor value! So does that mean i need to carry them around forever if i want to be resistant to fire in a pinch?

Another option; You can enchant your sword for 5 fire damage, or you can not enchant it, wait for about 2 levels, and upgrade it via smithing by the same amount. And then, a few levels later, you can upgrade it further, and further! It seems like its a massive waste to enchant anything before you at least have a few perks into the skill and have gotten very high level upgraded equipment! And yet, at high levels you can get absolutely insane things like 100% resistance to magick and whatnot. You dont need that stuff when you're high level, you need it when you're low level and getting creamed by everything!

Wouldn't it be great if at least some parts of the system were balanced around low levels? A hard damage removal system, perhaps? At level 1, taking 5 damage off per hit would help an extreme amount, but at level 10 you would barely even notice it. Why can't we have things like that at lower levels?


Or look at block. At a low level, essentially all it does it cut your damage down to 1/4th what it should be. How? According to the wiki(albeit not guaranteed to be accurate), armor value translates to "(Visible armor value+20)*.12 . This means that a low level shield gives you approximately 4-5% extra resistance to damage, and an extra possibly 20-35% resistance to damage while actively blocking. However, all that really matters at a low level is the ratio of damage enemies do/their lifespan. If you are shielding carefully and hitting from behind it, you will do about half the damage of if you were not shielding at all; if you dual wield, you end up getting double what you do if you don't shield, essentially meaning you have 1/4th the time to take damage. Doesn't this mean that a shield should counteract 75% of incoming damage? Apparently not.

So what does blocking end up doing, total? It reduces incoming damage by about 40%, so you survive for 40% longer. It then makes killing enemies take 4 times longer, coming to a total of BOOSTING the damage you take by something like 100%!

And on top of that, magic goes entirely around your armor value! A dual wielding character with no shield will take the same amount of damage per second, but kill the enemy twice as fast, until you get to level 50 in block and get a good deal of perks in the block tree...perks that could have been spent increasing your damage, and killing enemies faster!

And as if to compound this even further, the perks aren't even balanced; the first one handed perk gives 20%, then 40%, then 60% damage increase; the first block perk gives 20%, but then only 25%, 30%, and so on!


What I'm saying here is that the skills do not mesh well in this game. Becoming ludicrously poweful in the endgame is just fine, but being ludicrously weak in the beginning just because you picked a certain playstyle? It just seems a tad bit unfair to me.

Well that fell off quickly.