Us Bretons are just gonna chill out. Hope all ends well.

That would also be the end of the Bosmer as well.

The Great Hunt permanently turns them into monsters.

Actually, there is a book about the Nords' powers of the voice which confirms that Nords can make their enemies turn and run with a roar/warcry.

Notice how you've shifted position from the title now?
'Based on their racial powers and skills what races seems the most powerful on the Battlefield'

Racial powers are a game mechanic. Outside of a gimmick conjuring ability and the Nords' natural affinity for the voice, there are no racial powers outside of game mechanics; unless you want to count night vision, which should really be a passive ability for the Khajiit.

That, and the Orcs have their own arrows and bows, so you're wrong about them having no ranged attack.

"Orcs have berserk. I believe I have gone over why that is of little import but feel free to try and refute me on it. Bring a good argument or don't bother. They are a heavy armored warrior race that are experienced in warfare. They lack an ability to do damage at longer ranges."

People have, you just believe your word is absolute truth. Just reading your latest comment is enough to make my tea taste sour. But anyway.

If we base it on the recent history, I'd happily stand behind the Reguards. They still hold a free nation, and managed to do it with minimal numbers. Whether they used Hammerfalls terrain as an advantage is unclear, though.

Whilst I'm posting in this topic again, which has been fun apart from the OPs offerings, Bosmer+powerful animal > Dunmer Ghost.

Yeah this argument is basically over, haha. Nice chatting with you guys, though. Have a great day.

Done it is then. Guess it was too much to ask for people to actually apply tactics alongside their arguments.

Oh and I did not say they Orcs had NO range attacks. I said they lack an ability to do damage. To be more specific I meant a great deal of damage. Nothing in the lore nor previous skills supports the Orcs having a great deal of familiarity with bows. They can use them sure. But not as effectively as a Bosmer or Dunmer.

All you have done is refute my counter examples. Never giving any good arguments to refute my own points with the exception of Black Spider. Which I responded to.

Naturally a conversation has to to adapt. Try to adapt with it.

I keep a more than open mind but so far you have not given me very many good reasons for you points. None that I can think of off the top of my head anyways. If you actually had given a good argument I would listen to it. But as it is you just show how limited your understanding of this topic and tactics is. That is not saying you are stupid or dumb or anything lack that. Just uninformed about those things.

Have a good one. This thread obviously is going no where in Skyrim general.

Except invading Skyrim took about 30-60 Bosmer. So while it might end some of the army any Bosmer could take up at least 7 times his number when you use groups around 30.

Yes the Wild Hunt is a fearsome ability but they would not use it in these circumstances. The whole thing actually is more complex than just bosmer turn into psycho-pathic murdering monster.

And the few accounts of the great hunt had many more bosmer succumbing to the Great Hunt iirc. There are no numbers that say there were 30-60 Wild Bosmer afaik.

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Wild_Hunt

They would not use it in these circumstances. They would more than likely retreat imo. They are not proud of that ability and certainly would not use it unless under the most stress. Besides it is a ritual. Not something that can be done in the middle of a battle when their luck turns sour.

No, what you did is realise your initial assertion was too easily refuted, and so attempted to change the ground of the argument so suit you. On 'racial powers', Dunmer are far from the most powerful. Live with it.

How? I could easily make the point that a horde of Dunmer on fire would be much more intimidating than a bunch of Orcs going berserk. If I ONLY wanted to base it on racial power. It is not easily refuted at all. See below.

The effects of the Ancestral Wrath ability would compound as more Dunmer got together in ranks while they remain unaffected due to their natural resistance to fire. Any Orc that got close would be burnt to a crisp in seconds. The Dunmer would not even need to engage in melee. They could sit there on fire blasting out swaths of destruction magic at the Orcs. Even chase down the heavily armored Orcs while they were on fire.

So yeah. Refute that. Especially with the Orcs Berserk ability. Hard not to feel pain when your flesh has melted form your bones.

Live with that.

Except the Dunmer only have a 50% resistance to fire, so they'd still all die from each other's flames eventually.

The Berserk ability in-game means you take half damage, not pain. Pain has nothing to do with it. Therefore the Orcs would take the same amount of damage from the ancestral fire as the Dunmer would. The difference, of course, is that the Orcs are doing double damage during that time..

Since the flames are ancestors they would not harm the friendly Dunmer. Simple explanation.

You mean speculation. There is nothing to suggest that in-game at all, and nothing to suggest that anyone in game can control the capacity of their flames to burn another, with the exception of their own personal safety. Even then, if you set fire to something else and touch it you still get burned.

An Imperial. Because they can just spit their voice of the emperor game and everyone just calms the heck down.

Imperial: " Lets just sit down, have a cup of tea, and wait for this all to blow over"

I want a mod that inserts Shawn of the Dead soundbites into Voice of the Emperor.

Again. Why are you taking the powers so literally. There would not be health bars in this battle with measurable armor value alongside them. Stop being so immature.

A Berserk Orc getting hit by an axe does not suddenly take half damage from that blow. The blow would land the same. The Orc just might not feel the same amount of pain as someone else who is not berserked. The power in game is supposed to reflect a higher pain and through pain power threshold. That is how berserkers work. They ignore the needs of their body adn push their limits. That causes them to sacrifice precision and nimbleness for strength. That was even reflected in earlier Orc powers. In Oblivion they had a loss of agility. In-game for Skyrim the drawback is when an Orc goes berserk the screen turns red and a little blurry while sound dulls. There are drawbacks. Even clearly represented in game. The Orc obviously is supposed to be going crazy and into a bloodrage of sorts.

If the blow landed and was a killing blow the orc would be dead. If the orc was consumed in flames he would not be able to see as his eyes melt out of his skull. The Orc would not do more damage as their is no damage number to mention. They would exert more strength and less precision in their blows. They would be less aware of their surroundings. Which is perfect for a nimble elf in light armor. Clumsy strong crazed warrior going berserk = dead warrior if that warrior is up against a disciplined and coordinated enemy. Which is exactly what a Dunmer is.

The thing is, when you try and attribute the powers to real-world situations, then resistance to fire could barely exist at all, and would at best be a tolerance to heat. As I said, they only have a 50% tolerance - they would all still burn and die from their own powers, and die from contact with a flaming Orc.

Either way, the Dunmer racial power is not the best, and your attempts to justify it as such are pure speculation.

This is of course without even considering that the Nords' Battlecry is confirmed to cause the enemy to turn and run through in-game books. Explain that one away.

One guy did that, no? Are you seriously going to say that if one guy, a novel protagonist even, can do something then it *must* be something any Dunmer can do at will? Please remember that your "non-debatable" Dunmer ability was included in a single game, and that game wasn't the one that actually took place in the Dunmer homeland and contained the most Dunmer of any TES game yet. And by the way, how many Dunmer used that skill in Morrowind? Zero? Can you name me any of the more powerful Dunmer in Morrowind who would summon an ancestor ghost? No? Doesn't that tell you something about how outspread the ability to summon ghosts is?

The TES universe is fairly supernatural to begin with and a fairly random combination of innate minor powers is hardly going to change anything. Consider for a moment that any of these things is still something any rookie mage could do just as well. Also consider that unless you wish to argue a mathematical factor across an entire race, you won't get the same strength of abilities for all the Dunmer.

As far as the application goes, I can imagine a unit of Dunmer lit up like a christmas tree and begging to get shot by enemy archers. That's not really too useful. Another unit who can invoke time-limited dodge bonus but who still aren't remotely invulnerable and who would still easily get crushed by actual frontline infantry. Another unit of Dunmer casting the lowliest of summoning spells, and yes, until you prove otherwise, I will continue to consider ghosts a crap summon. You know what, I'm not actually impressed.

Yes, some Dunmer are quite decent with destruction spells. Same is true for some Bretons and some Imperials and quite a few Altmer. Let's see how skilled they are when the archer-Orcs let loose with their no doubt massive longbows and rain down cloud after cloud of arrows. No, they're not Bosmer-accurate by a long shot, but physics dictate that bigger bows = longer range, and Orcs can definitely use bigger bows than Bosmer. And good luck to the unit of Dunmer who try the ancestor ghost stunt, because Orcs don't frighten on a battlefield. They will simply see a bunch of ghost-summoning squishies, get into the mental zone, and then start squishing the squishies. Ghosts or not, a Dunmer vs a battle-dressed Orc warrior on a battlefield is *not* a fair fight for the Dunmer.

What proper reference points do we have, other than that ghosts have been a joke enemy in every game they've made an appearance in? By the way, if you want to talk Dunmer then PLEASE look at Morrowind. Doesn't get more lore-defining than the game that basically rewrote the book on Dunmer.

In what books are ghosts things to be feared? Daedra, sure, but ghosts? Show me any game where they're supposed to be dangerous, then we can talk. And by the way, please don't pretend that the Champ of Cyrodiil, the Nerevarine, or the Dovahkiin were powerful out of the ordinary early on in their journey. The Nerevarine, arguably the most powerful of the bunch, was spent some time as an Imperial prisoner and struggled to kill mudcrabs and cliff racers.

And of course you think I'm selling them short. You're trying to blow ridiculously weak ghosts up as a super-creature that all Dunmer ever can call at will, despite there being abso freaking lutely no lore that supports such an interpretation. And yes, game does equal lore, at least as far as I'm concerned. TES is a game series, after all. If the games didn't convey lore then what on Earth would?

Find me anyone who insists that every Altmer ever is an extra powerful mage. You probably can't. Same thing with Orcs. They have a potential for berserking but that doesn't mean every single one has the ability to berserk for double damage. A race doesn't work like that. Every single Breton also don't have 25-50% magic resistance. Some of them probably don't have any, but in general they tend to have loads of it.

And again, if every single Dunmer could summon a ghost then why don't they EVER use that ability for something useful in ANY game EVER MADE? Why didn't any of the Telvanni or Redorans pull this stunt? Why didn't the Dark Brotherhood hordes under Mournhold pull this stunt? Because one single character in some novel is a better depiction of the abilities of an entire race than the game the ruling entity made about said race's homeland?

False assumption. You don't know that every single one of your lowliest soldiers can summon actual ghosts, you don't know how strong those ghosts are, and there's every reason to think that the ghosts disappear the moment the Dunmer who summoned it dies. Yes, you can pull some nifty flanking maneuvers but flanking an Orc battle formation with normal Dunmer soldiers and weakling ghosts is like flanking a unit of urban cohorts with Iberians while your scutarii hold their front in an RTW battle: It seems like it should work but neither group can actually hurt the Urbans all that much while the same definitely isn't true in reverse and so the Urbans will steadily chew their way through both groups. Same thing with Orcs vs Dunmer in open battle. Dodge is great in one on one fights, the kind an "operative" might get into, but it's not remotely as effective in pitched battles where a sidestep may very well simply throw you out in front of the charging orc next to the one you just dodged.

And your proof is what, exactly? What source has ever shown this to be how Dunmer do battle?

Only in-game Dunmer who ever could do that as a racial power was the Champ of Cyrodiil. The Dunmer Dovahkiin can't. The Dunmer Nerevarine could not. Like it or not, it seems very much like the spiritual ancestor connection manifests in a wide variety of ways but there is no justification whatsoever for claiming that all of the Dunmer have all these options.

Yes, we are of course stereotyping but there's the reasonable way to do that and the silly way. The silly way is akin to the fat Yank stereotype. We have a stereotype that says all Yanks are fat and dumb and drive SUVs and love commercials and eat at McD so of course all Yanks are fat and if you're not fat and dumb then you're not a true Yank. I'm sure you agree that such a view is actually beyond silly. A much more reasonable use of the stereotype is that Americans on average are somewhat heavy and that they suffer from tunnel-vision regarding knowledge of places outside the US. That's a much more reasonable use of the stereotype, though of course it's still just a generalization that in quite a lot of cases simply isn't true.

Putting that into perspective, you'll get that Dunmer have a strong connection with their ancestors but you won't have every single Dunmer being a master swordsman and master wizard with an innate ability to summon ghosts, create a flame shield or become harder to hit. Similarly, you'll have Orc berserk as a stereotype but not as a rule. Many orcs can berserk but the effects of it vary from Orc to Orc. Similarly, not all Altmer are master wizards. Some are in fact crap wizards but good warriors. Some are merely okay wizards. They generally have more magicka than anyone else and they're generally more vulnerable to the elements as well. Not all Bosmer are superb archers, either. Not all Redguards have crazy stamina regen. Not all Argonians regenerate health equally fast.

Nord warcry effect would depend upon a number of circumstances. Morale isn't static at all. At a distance from downhill the warcry might not do too much, but a unit engaged with Nords and about to be flanked would probably crap itself under the effect of a warcry.

Imperial "Voice of the emperor" really just indicates, at least to me, that they can turn on charisma mode and become really pursuasive in a discussion. Such as the one we're having now, for instance. Won't do much on a battlefield, though. Even so, the Imperials are perhaps the finest light infantry in Tamriel. Extremely well rounded, good tactical understanding, good discipline, and very experienced with combined arms.

Bosmers have a mostly ignored ability of being able to initiate a Great Hunt, permanently turning themselves into frenzied predators. That is almost guaranteed to deal one hell of a blow to their enemies. Of course, the change is permanent so they don't do it too often.

Finally, don't forget the large variety of different Khajiit. Battle cats are massive, tiger-lige beasts weighing possibly several tons. Now imagine these things carrying frenzied regular Khajiits on their back and you've got one unpleasant mouthful. What has traditionally kept the Khajiit down is their near-complete lack of organization.

The rest I more or less agree with you about. Except for the Dunmer, but that particular horse is already too dead to continue beating on. Regarding the ability of Orcs and Nords to do long range damage, please do consider that battlefield archery wasn't historically a question of extreme individual accuracy but rather of putting out large clouds of arrows that would rain down upon an unprotected enemy army. That isn't to say that historical archers weren't ever accurate, but rather that accuracy wasn't the point on a battlefield. What I'm getting at is that while Orcs and Nords certainly don't come close to Bosmer accuracy, they're much better suited to wield bigger bows. They'd lose in a shootout vs Bosmer for sure but that doesn't mean they can't lob plenty of arrows after annoying wizards and running Dunmer.

Yes except in this case those flames are not just flames. They are benevolent spirits working in conjunction with the Dunmer with a mind of their own.

Same for your party. What evidence has your party put forth? Besides I am in an argument with what three of you? You have altogether not really put forth anything compelling. When I bring up a point you say it is me changing the argument yet the evidence for what I bring up is in the lore or through basic understanding of the past games can be used to draw basic conclusions. THIS IS ALL THEORY. Do you not get that?

Well technically the Nords have the Thu'um. Likely that book is describing that. Link to the book please and I will verify it. The Nords also do not use the Thu'um in open battle anymore so...done.

You say Dunmer when the Dunmer got eaten out of their home by the Argonians?

You're saying the Dunmer have the best racials, I'm saying they don't. I'm not arguing in defence of any race in particular, but the ability to set yourself on fire pales in comparison to many other abilites. Your beinging up of the lore is still irrelevant based on the fact a 'racial power' is a purely game-based mechanic - to which end the Dunmer's is not the most effective by any reasoning without wandering outside of gameplay and into speculation.

And yes they are flames. The source of the flames may be spectral, but they are still flames, they set things they contact on fire.

The Nord book is called 'children of the sky'. Yes it does refer to the thu'um, except as somebody has pointed out, there's no indication that all Dunmer are capable of using ancestor powers, whereas the Nords are confirmed in-game to all be capable of learning and using the thu'um. The Dragonborn just does it faster, or if he's not a Nord he can do it where others of his kind may not be capable.

I made the assumption about the Dunmer BECAUSE the other parties make the assumption that their race would all have the power as well. That is why I did it.

Besides powers aside the Dunmer are a powerful fighting force composed of great warriors as well as mages. Not every single on of them is great but they are typically a powerful force. They are not slouches.
"Their combination of powerful intellects with strong and agile physiques produce superior warriors and sorcerers. On the battlefield, Dunmer are noted for their skill with a balanced integration of the sword, the bow and destruction magic." In game sources are in this lore pages as well. http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Dunmer#cite_note-OM-2 feel free to browse.

They are a more accomplished army than the Orcs. Orcs as a people have next to no experience in larger conflicts aside from those who spent time in the imperial legion. As a nation they were crushed twice. They cannot even hold onto their own kingdom or ever gain more of a foothold in expanding it.

Regular Dunmer CAN and DO summon their own ancestors for guidance. http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Ancestors_and_the_Dunmer this is an indication of this. However it does not explain with those limitations how a random dunmer in the Imperial sewers can summon ancestral ghosts unless it is more or less a fairly universal option. Especially give bethesda's ideology that our Hero has no background except for what we give them. So if this is true then the summoning of ancestral ghosts would have to be standard. The thing that is up for speculation is the function of the summoning. Is is an actual ghost? Does it fight or give advice. Unfortunately Bethesda contradicts its own lore in regards to the racials about every single game so we cannot know how it works only assume they all do. I think it is fairly safe to say all the Dunmer at the very least could summon an ancestor ghost. What we do not know is whether it is inherent or learned. Much like the Nordic Thu'um. As the poster above me mentioned.

Some Nords can use it and most cannot. But it would seem that maybe many could learn it. However the greybeards are not much of an indication on this. The Thu'um is from the Dragons. Theoretically it could be learned by anyone right? Not just Dragonborn and Nords? Dragonborn are just faster learners and usually more powerful.

About the flames bit from the Witcher. Those flames could burn yes. But would the ancestors let them reach the other Dunmer? They obviously can prevent them from harming the user.

Need to finish a paper be back in a bit.

This right here is fallacious reasoning. By that logic you could basically invent lore simply because your guy has no backstory other than what you decide.

Redguards and Orcs, and possibly, Imperials are better warriors.

Altmer and Bosmer are better mages.

Dunmer may be good at several things, they're not great in any of them, though. That's where you fall apart here, most other races have one specific talent that outweighs the the others. Dunmer are comparatively weak with magic compared to Altmer, they are also comparatively weak, physically, compared with Redguard/Orc. If you match them up against X race, they are outclassed, diversity is a good thing, but not when you face specialised opponents.

I was joking. It was a joke. So take the joke. And besides; racial powers alone do not make or break a battle. The Dunmer cant just go "Ancestor Ghost! I WIN!!" And every Dark Elf isnt Superman because they can use a sword + magic.