Werewolf Form: Worthless

This should be the title of this thread.

When and how are these new abilities unlocked / learned / discovered? Another post mentioned three totems. Are these locations that must be visited while in werewolf form?

Pray in the underforge (where you're made a werewolf in the companions)

I'm level 50 and I find beast form to be more like werehorse than werewolf. I get ripped to shreds by arrows that bounce off my daedric armor doing damage that can be summed up as "rounding error". I even leveled light armor quite a bit (I'm around high 70s with 3 perks in protection) to see if it'd help but it doesn't, or at least doesn't help significantly. I've heard transforming gives you +100 health but reduces your armor to 0 and I believe it. Assuming that's true, let's say you have 300 health (I do anyway). 80% damage reduction from your armor would give you 1500 effective health while as a werewolf you only have 400, basically cutting your health to a quarter. This more or less aligns with my experiences. If you scale it to 400 health, which is easily achievable, the difference expands to 2000 against 500. Another scaling issue is that your fear howl doesn't work past level 25...

Werewolves need a drastic buff, even more than destruction. At higher levels it's a once a day power that takes off 75% of your max health, forces you into third person (I prefer first person), disables all your menus; doesn't let you cast spells, eat food, or drink potions to heal; makes everyone hostile to you, and makes you take extra damage from silver and daedric weapons (daedric is the real killer here) for 3 minutes. It is effectively the longest lasting and most debilitating debuff in the game. It also disables your rest bonus in human form. The silver lining here is you sprint faster than horses and can't be overencumbered, though if you were in human form you could just fast travel anyway.

Just as a side note...but did you make use of your Roar?
'

You can mass fear a room as a werewolf.
Not when Encumbered you can't.

No wonder my wolf kicks so much tail. o.o

I found the werewolfs of Morrowind to be much better. I miss the "fish-eye" view.

He said

Well, at level 40+ I found little use for the beast form other than being superfast. That said, I do not think it is worthless, you just need to think more about how you fight stronger oponents because if you do you can make good advantages out of the speed.

Seriously? Where did you hear that? That's a pretty strange way of handling it. I thought you just got +100 stamina and health and claw attacks leveled with you.

It's actually pretty bad ass if you use it right. Don't expect to run into a room full of mobs and go to town just by swinging your claws around. You have to use the knock down attacks and the fear howl when there's multiple enemies.

Personally I cured myself, as it didn't fit my character.

Basically, this^. Is there a source? If this is true, it really hurts 2H Heavy Armor users as well as mages, but we knew it would hurt mages.

Elder Scrolls Wiki.

And I have noticed that the wolf has remained equally effective even as enemies lvl up. So it must mean his abilities increase as well.

Why exactly would I want to THINK MORE and work harder to fight a hard boss in beast mode when I can just stay in Orc form with my Daedric Armor, 90 Mace skill, 86 heavy armor skill, set him on fire with Tor Shul, then give his face a great big blessing from Molag Bal? ESPECIALLY when as a beast, I CANT EVEN LOOT HIS CORPSE AFTER I KILL HIM UNLESS I WAIT UNTIL THE DAMN BEAST FORM WEARS OFF?!

How exactly is what you said an endorsemant?

Another article on the Wiki suggests that the Werewolf simply levels up (base 8?) with you until lvl 45.

There needs to be a patch or a mod that makes it so werewolf isn't completely useless at level 50+. I am currently level 53, and with my weapons and armor, I can afford to leave my character by himself, amongst 6 mid level enemies and take my sweet time one hitting them with my daedric one handed sword on Expert difficulty(gotta raise it to Master). There are 3 guys, a forsworn archer, one hander, and dual wielder. So I decide to have a little fun and go werewolf for the first time in about 35 levels or so. Howl, no one runs. Takes 15 consecutive hits to kill one person after having to debilitate them. Then the dual wielder does one, single, power attack. I die. 450hp(werewolf buff included) instantly downed, he didn't even crit me. So what it seems to me is that they need to mod your armor/weapon rating without enchantments into it, because if this is a DAILY HIGHER POWER, I would think it would be...high powered? People say it is OP, sure, at levels 1-18, levels 19-24 meh, 25+ it becomes more and more under powered. If this is a skill I can only use once per day, for 2.5 minutes, and only extend it from the playable races, it better be good for all levels. Because at high levels, it is reduced to basically a disease that keeps you from getting other diseases and sleeping well. Ergo, insomnia with a SEVERE anger problem.

After a little research of how the werewolf works in Skyrim I have found multiple, consistant claims. These are that werewolf armor rating is affected by Light Armor skill level and perks, and that the attack damage rating is affected by One Handed skill level and perks. Thirdly, I can confirm that at level 45+, the werewolf claw attack is a base of 20 plus 60, making it 80 at base value at level 45 and up.
I went and tested these claims as best as I could.

Alright, so my Current level in Light Armor is 90, and I know from UESP.net 's skill pages, every level of Light Armor increases the rating by 0.4%. And my One Handed is level 95, and I also know from UESP.net 's skill pages that every level of One Handed increases the rating by 0.5%. The supposed Light Armor skill that affect the werewolf is the first perk on the light armor tree, which I have ranked at 5. And the supposed One Handed skills that affect the werewolf are Armsman which I have ranked at 4, Dual Flurry which I have at rank 0, and Dual Savagery which I also have at rank 0. The first test I conducted was where I used the console to add Dual Flurry and Dual Savagery to see the effect on weapon speed increase with unenchanted/unimproved Daedric swords, and then the increase on werewolf claw speed. After doing one test, with the swords, their speed SIGNIFICANTLY increased, where the claw speed did not increase at all, noticeably so. Meaning those two perks mean nothing to a werewolf. So, with Armsman at level 4, the test for werewolf was easy, I simply used the console to remove my perk points in Armsman to test the damage difference with or without them on an Ice Troll set to not aggro with the console, and counted how many normal attacks to kill. After testing with and without the perk, it took the same number of hits to kill the Ice Troll in both scenarios. This means Armsman does not affect werewolf. Now that we eliminated the damage perks and are down to simply the skill increase of 0.5% per level, I can calculate the damage of a werewolf claw attack compared to a Daedric sword boosted by the perks and skill level.
Here is the math;
Werewolf: 20(base) + 60(45+ scaled) = 80
With the level increase: 80 + (80 * ((95 * 0.5) / 100)) = 80 + (80 * (47.5 / 100)) = 80 + (80 * 0.475) = 80 + 38 = 118
So my claw attacks do 118 adjusted damage.
Daedric Swords: 14 base
With level increase: 14 + (14 * 0.475) = 14 + 6.65 = 20.65
With perk bonus of 80%: 20.65 * 1.8 = 37.17
After this math I checked what a newly smithed Daedric sword would do and it was 37, so my calculation is spot on.

So with unenchanted/unimproved weapons, werewolf claws are much better, however, that Daedric sword for me is sub-par. If I equip the maximum of 4 pieces of 40% damage boost to One Handed damage armor(takes 100 enchanting, which I have, along with a grand soul, easy to get with Azura's Black Star), and also improve my sword to legendary with the heavy armor perk side of smithing and level 100 smithing, that Daedric sword is boosted to a wopping 245 damage. Making the werewolf claws egregiously obsolete. Meaning, at level 53, not a far cry from 45, werewolf attack rating is under powered, without regular weapons even being enchanted.
Now, testing the armor was a bit dicey. But I came up with a plan, first I equipped my best armor, got my rating to 1125. Then use the console command player.getavinfo DamageResist, and the output was 1125, spot on. So I turned into a werewolf and did the same. The output was 288. With that I was able to test the Light Armor perk by removing all 5 of my ranks, making the armor value to theoretically be no longer twice as high, meaning a rating of 144. So I repeated the test and sure enough, the output was 144, so that perk DOES count. And if we take my 90 light armor levels and multiply them by 0.4, we get 36, or 36% boost to light armor. So if we divide 144 by 1.36, we arrive at around 105.88. Now after I used player.setav lightarmor 0, and then redid the player.getavinfo DamageResist, it gave me a current value of 106, spot on again. So now that I know that that claim is true I can get the values for maxed Light armor. To do no math I simply used player.setav light armor 100, to set it to level 100, then did the armor test again and arrived at 148 maxed with no perks. Now if I re-add the perks my armor rating should be 296, right? Well, I added them back, and tested again, and I was right. So the ABSOLUTE maximum defense of a werewolf is 296. Now that got me thinking of a way to test the damage, so I used the command player.getavinfo UnarmedDamage. The results were saddening. The out put was 80, base was 20, level boost was 60..sound familiar? 20 + 60 = 80. What was sad was if it was in fact affected by one handed it would have been 118, right? Or if also affected by my rank 4 Armsman it would have been 214.4, right? Well it was neither. Meaning that the claw attacks simply RAISE One Handed skill experience, but it does not benefit from it.

So with that werewolf armor rating of 288 at my level, how does that compare to the up to my level armor such as full Dragonscale unenchanted/unimproved? Not well. With the perks I have and skill level, my total defense with Dragonscale armor/boots/gloves/helmet came to 140 + 43 + 43 + 60 = 286. Honestly that number made me laugh when I saw it. So this means that if I have full unenchanted/unimproved Dragonscale, and go into werewolf form I am gaining 2 armor rating(woopie) and 43 damage from my Daedric sword, bundled with a weakness to silver weapons, no magic resistance aside from any racial traits. But of course, that's if I had only base weaponry and armor, and even then it isn't much of a boost. And in my opinion, 288 defense and 80 damage do not compare to 1125 defense and 245 damage.

Now after compiling all this data, I can see why some people think it is overpowered. Well it is, at low levels, where the enemies are low level as well. At mid levels it would be basically just a special skin change power with a knock out punch. And at 45+ levels, it is worthless.

It is for those reasons I believe that werewolf needs a scaling buff.

^
Great post. Bethesda really dropped the ball with how things scale from early to mid to late on so many aspects of the game.

-snip-



I was doing these calculations myself and noticed that it was indeed turning out to be a wet noodle. =(

I have played the Werewolf at lvl 40 and I have no trouble when fighting I tear my apponites apart exsept when I come across thouse with silver weapons then they do massive damage to me...

Werewolf totems? Whar?

Totems:-

Interesting... The fear ability is pretty useful, but I imagine the summons could be pretty sweet too. Although, I don't have any experience using the werewolf at high levels.

I saw that one-handed skill and perks carry over into wolf form but the wiki doesn't mention anything about light armor factoring in.

i used it a few times...mainly as an alternative to riding a horse, i relyed on my high armor rating and weapon skill, and potions to keep my warrior alive. Werewolf really screwed that up

Even though I agree that the werewolf's defenses and damage don't scale quite well enough at later levels, comparing it to that setup of yours is not really fair, since weaponskill-enchantments are simply gamebreaking. That +160% damage is just ridiculous.
But thanks for taking the time to test the skills & perks on this, good info.