I haven't tried playing a "pure" mage. Maybe you're right. I'll give it a go and see what I think. All I can say is my Battlemage is very balanced - sometimes even low-level bad guys get the drop on me and kill me and sometimes if I plan it right I can kill stuff way tougher than me (as in how I overcame that bloody Frost Troll on the way up to High Hrothgar). I've done some smithing (skill at 60) but no real enchanting or potion-making because they don't interest me as much.

I'm not sure the OP is correct about skills like crafting and illusion being too strong - the simple fix is to simply use a bit of self control with these. There have always been exploits in TES games to make ridiculously powerful characters, and while it's an option it's not a necessity to beat the game. This does not restrict choice in the game, it merely allows to munchkinism which is very much a personal choice, and a valid one.

However, the OP has a good point about the underpowered skills. The inability for a skill to maintain usefulness throughout the game is a major flaw and, in the case of destruction, it can't be overcome by exploiting crafting, so it therefore restricts character choice. A lot of people on these forums will immediately jump in when someone complains about destruction becoming useless and tell the poster to simple use conjuration or another school instead, but they've completely missed the point of the complaint - the character they were playing now either has to be scrapped or they have to completely change that character's archetype in order to be viable.

I also see a lot of people saying that destruction is a support school now and that companions or summons should be used. Well, that's simply not true before level 35. Up to 35 the school is very effective on its own and is just as useful as archery or melee skills in combat as a primary damage dealing mechanism. After about level 40 that changes radically because of enemy scaling. People dislike the way destruction magic is implemented not because it isn't as powerful as other schools, or because it's designed to be used differently from how they expected, or because they need to learn new tactics but because, put simply, destruction svcks right now because once a character hits level 35 the player has to start playing in a totally different way, ergo they are forced to change their character. I don't know about you, but that strikes me as going against everything that TES games stand for.

I'm sure a lot of players who tell magic users they're wrong for wanting to use destruction as their primary school would feel very differently and just as robbed of choice if halfway through their levelling process they had to switch from two-handed to sword and board, or archery to dual wielding because their first choice skill suddenly became unusable. Then they'd understand why comments like "well archery is just a support option now, you should use summons or companions as well" are absolutely infuriating.

I haven't played that far, and haven't seen any problem as of yet (particularly because I haven't fiddled with all the "problematic" perks that you mentioned) but...

While I agree with your point that players shouldn't be restricted by design, but rather by player choice, I don't think that being capable of being a godlike creature breaks the game

Or, are you saying that the game should be restricted that even at the maximum levels player should still see challenge?

Wouldn't that break the players that desire to become a godlike creature and not find resistance?

I <3 this post. A lot of the posters arguing about over-powered this, face-rolling that, balancing blah blah blah are maybe not used to this type of game - or perhaps simply thinking in terms of, in particular MMOs, where this stuff matters - but then again, you have to build to a certain spec to be competitive in raids and pvp. I care about this stuff on my WoW characters, in Rift and probably will when I play SWTOR. In Skyrim, I find it a pure, absorbing joy to just... make my character and see how the game goes.

And nice to see you around FlightFlyFlea

"Easier to overpower".

Is not that up to you?

Im having a blast and is often mutliated on Adept difficulity cause Im choosing to only use pickup gear and no smithing, no enchanting and no alchemy.
I generally play on Expert but often need to scale down.
On my 3rd time now Im only 24, but using bow and stealth which is considered overpowered. But I guess thats when you have muffled enchant and a butthurt of enchants for bow damage.
On expert, on a medium rare bandit, not the complete low life and definately not a bandit boss, when I do my stealth sneak shot for 3 times damage AND I crit him for 25% extra crit damage (got 2/3 perks) im taking out around half his life.
At this point he will notice me 75% of the time despite my 60 stealth and 50% noise reduction from light armor and come running. I will kill him. But...his other 2 friends thats tagging along will either kill me, or I need to run like hell.

Im having an utter blast with the combat alone, then we can look at the athmosphere and stories, which are amazing.
And Im coming from games such as Dark Souls. I know what hard is. I beat dark souls on normal and on nightmare +1.

But, you if you want a challenge in this game combat wise, you need to stay clear of secondary professions. Sad sure, but true. Heal pots you can make and magica pots.
But if you start to [censored] up smithing with enchanting and alchemy thats up to you. You will become very very very powerful. If thats what you want, fine, the game lets you.
But if you want to roleplay a ranger in fur clothes with a broken bow. You can do that too, but its going to be hard as nails.
And me...I like nails, especially the hard ones. And Skyrim presents me with the choice to play this game very hard. As it presents you OP with the ability to complain when you made a character using all 3 secondary professions.

I started a pure mage a few days ago, and granted im not very far into it, but it seems good so far. I expect it to be alot harder than my sword and board warrior and it is. Im leaning on Lydia and my Atronachs to keep me alive and i nuke from a distance and live on magicka potions, i go oom really quick, and frost trolls re the bane of my existence. I'm working to spread out my perks in all the schools though concentrating on destro and conjuration. Its fun but really hard, kinda what i expected....

I understand now. I'm only level 24. I'll let you know how I fair in twenty levels - but it could be awhile.

What I am saying is that how difficult the game is should depend on how you set the difficulty. In a balanced game, every option is about equivalent in power, meaning that they are just as viable when faced with the same level of content. Not only does that open up a lot more options for everyone to try different builds, but it also allows the devs to create a working difficulty slider since they can actually anticipate how powerfull a player will be independently of wether he went warrior, thief or mage.

What that means is that in a balanced game, someone looking for a challenge should find it in the highest difficulty setting, while someone looking to be a "godlike creature [that finds no] resistance" will find that at the lowest difficulty setting. Neither should have to build his character according to how hard they want the game to be, but rather according to how they want to play the game itself.

This thread is bad and you should feel bad.

Also, cherry picking posts to help your point is busch league.
Your point should be able to stand on it's own feet.

I don't have these problems. So I don't care. The game is
playing out fine for me. If things get easy I up the difficulty.
If things get hard, I do the opposite.

Furthermore: It's hard to take these threads seriously because
of the number of http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1290264-ragequitting/ I see daily.

I'm not saying the game doesn't have glitches or other problems, however.
So don't take this post as really devoted fan material.

His point stands just fine. Just because you don't have the ability to make a strong build (something that anyone with a bit of sense and 2 working brain cells should figure out after one minute of looking at perk trees) doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist. You can't up the difficulty above Master.

Your post is thoughtful, but respectfully, not getting the point.

The point for many players (about 1 million from fcom related downloads in oblivion) is that it's not about competition-- a straw man that's repeated ad nauseum on the boards. It's about interesting _choices_ that make a difference and improve, or at least don't violate immersion.

Many of us notice that the internal game world doesn't make sense. We want choices to effect gameplay, and be more than a cosmetic decision about what style armor looks good, or what particle effect is fired off when killing an enemy.

The truth is that most forum posters don't care about anything beyond the cosmetics, and that's fine, there's a lot to love about skyrim. But there's a sizeable minority that wants a better system, and that's not too much to ask of a game that claims to be an RPG.

In two days this is the 29th page. No, I wont reply to every single post, but rather I reply to those I believe have not been responded to already by someone else, or if I have a specific comment to make. This has nothing to do with trying to fix the odds.

The whole "it doesnt affect me so I don't care" is just good old selfishness, and its also a lie. You do care, otherwise you would not be posting in such an aggressive tone. Somehow you take it offensively that we are unhappy about some aspects of the game. My question is: Why?

I see everywhere in this forum players having very different impressions of the game.

Some say they are having a hard time. Some say they are gods even on master difficulty. And some are saying they are going just fine, and usually these are the ones who don't understand how can someone say this game be imbalanced. And the fact is that all this very wide variation of impressions is coming usually simply by the skills and perks each player is deciding to use on his character.

Well, as I understand it, players having very wide different impressions of the game just by choosing different things is exactly the very definition of "imbalance". The whole goal of this game is "do what you want". So I really would expect that, no matter what I choose to do, I would have at least similar results and chances to do it well.

Here's my problem with your post:

People intentionally set out to "win" the game with smithing, alchemy, and enchanting.
They then come on the forums and complain about how the game is easy, without giving
much more insight other than "I broke the game doing this, fix it beth!"

Not only that, they powerlevel these skills at the beginning without even seeing the world.
That, in and of itself, is the mmo mentality. Bigger, stronger, faster, NOW! Which is never how
these games were meant to be played.

These people thirst for dominance, and then complain when they reach it. Developers can't
balance around that.

These people take routes to make characters powerful: power leveling crafting, perfect
synergizing of perks, etc... Then complain that their characters are powerful. Another aspect of
the mmo mindset. If you strike out in a single player rpg with the mind to make your character all
powerful (min/maxin) you are going to get a powerful. I don't understand the complaint, when you
reached your desired end result.

Choice is choice. You make the choice to make an over powerful character, the game will be easy.
I don't know how these people are failing to understand that. I play the game to play the game.
I have yet to be upset by this, barring the handful of debilitating bugs. That's for another thread.

As for being unbalanced, eh, maybe a little bit. But it's not something gamebreaking and certainly not enough to complain with a wall of text about. You could have spent the time you took to write this post up actually playing Skyrim instead.

These comments that defend bad design are the reason these problems are so bad.

I'm sorry I hurt your feelings. I don't think my tone is overly aggressive.

Just because someone asserts their opinion firmly doesn't mean they are angry.

And I do care. I do care that you are coming in here and bashing a game that I'm enjoying (aside
from the bugs). It's hard for someone to understand what you are saying, when they don't have
the same concerns as you. I don't care that you can break the game because I've not had the problem
in 100-ish hours of gameplay across several characters.

Catch my drift? Why do you so heartily take offense when someone disagrees with you? Why must you take issue
with my opinions and experience being different? If you didn't want criticisms you should post this in a blog, and not
an open forum. Disagree with me all you want, that's your right. But don't point the flame finger at me when you're the
one that opened yourself up to criticism and debate by posting a thread in an open forum.

People always set out to win the game. Thats the point of playing it.

Now everyone likes to do so in a different way, but it doesnt change the fact that we are all aiming for the same thing. Personally, I do not thirst for dominance. Quite the opposite, one of the points this thread makes is that we (me and the people who agreed with me) want more of a challenge. Yes, we strive to build the best character we can, simply because smart character developpement is, to us, something very fun.

So never did I strive to be overpowered. I took smithing and enchanting because nothing else other then my weapon and armor skills have anything to do with melee performance. Yes, on a melee character, I chose to craft better melee gear. How is that, in any shape or form, a strange or outliner way to play a RPG? You would have a point if I needed to abuse the loops, but even without them Master difficulty is nowere near hard enough if you just happened to choose and use perks that are given to you by the game and presented as if they should be just as potent as any other perk, which is just not the case.

Did I level smithing volontarely? Yes. Did I overpower myself completely by accident? Yes. I did not make that choice, there was just no other choice other then "select perks according to the difficulty you are aiming for", which, if you had read the TD;LR, let alone my whole post, you would understand is the entire argument here: where is the "be what you want to be"?

(im a dungeon crawler, i love exploring, so ironically I did exactly the opposite of what you accuse me of doing: seeing the world is what got me 100 smithing.)

Yeah, I also don't understand why people try to defend some things that are really wrong. This way they'll never improve.

For example, there's a lot of people commenting that the game textures are bad. I personally don't care a little bit about textures, for me the game is gorgeous anyway. But I agree the textures are really bad and can be enhanced. So why defend it?

I unfairly lumped you in with some of the worse posts on this topic. I've realized my mistake
after reading this post, and re-reading your op. I'm sorry

They may not apply to you so much, but I stand by my previous posts pertaining to the subject.

Hmmmm, I think I now agree with your first post in it's entirety (rather than just the parts about underpowered skills). Because I've just not used smithing I didn't encounter any problems and only thought the overpowered gear could come from using alchemy/enchant exploit with smithing. If it's the case that smithing on it's own is broken then that too needs to be fixed in a patch...

Your missing the point. Right now, almost half of the skill trees are not viable. They are either completely worthless or break the game. Yes, its a single player game. Whats wrong with wanting it to be balanced, and imagine this..."challenging" to boot? Right now on master difficulty I am running around destroying everything. I know gaming companies have been catering more & more to "the majority" (aka making games easy to play) but this is ridiculous. TES is turning into a Nintendo Wii game targeted for 10 yr olds...

,,,,lockpicking and speech usless perks. They are quality of life improving perks. Just like the perk in pickpocketing that gives you extra weight to carry, or heavy armor being weightless, NEITHER OF THOSE MAKE YOU A BETTER CHARACTER, but they are quality of life improving. Pickpocketing actually can be an extremely fun source of high income, and a way to kill people with strong poisons in cities without alerting anyone to anything, ever. (though thats really not helping you kill bandits faster so of course you think its trash and therefore have better game designs just waiting to be shown). Lockpicking is as useful. Master locks are a breeze to bust open, and you find more loot. Why is this bad to you? Because your daedric swords dont hit harder for it? Get out of here boy. Quality of life improving skills/spells/perks are totally fine and far more legitimate than whatever it is you think should replace them I'd wager.

Speech is awesome. Being able to bribe your way out of anything, always, is nice. Sure you can persuade a guard to not mess with you (with unperked speech at 90+ i might add) but the bounty is still there, bribes remove your bounties. And being able to make any vendor buy anything, stolen or otherwise, and have way more gold on hand, is a tremendous quality of life improver. Not to mention the ACTUAL speech checks you can always complete making many quests easier.

Seriously, you truly think that if a perk doesnt make your armor count go up, or your dps go up, you think its terrible.

I did not say there were useless. I said speechcrafting is an income-increasing tree (aka QoL) because the gameplay value it could have had is greatly diminished by the lack of actual opportunities to use it. Most quests in the game only have 1 outcome, and no amount of speechcrafting will ever unlock another. I also said lockpicking is redundant because it already has an alternative that no other skill has: you can get better at it. Again, it means in itself that the tree is of a QoL nature.

Maybe pointless was a bit strong, but both trees are definitly not as powerfull in terms of what they bring you in-game as the others (QoL vs Build-defining), while requiring the same investment. It is not that I dont like the concepts, but it has definitly been under-developped in Skyrim.

P.S. What did you mean by this?


Bribes have nothing to do with speech. You can bribe just about any NPC with intimidate/persuade option without a single perk spent into Speech.

I don't clearly remember the speech perks, but mostly it's about making money. Sell more, buy less, invest more gold to sell more, etc etc, without any perks that are actually useful outside mercantilism. You can't talk someone out to let you go in battle, or make any changes in dialogues, since who and when you can persuade is limited.

Besides, doesn't the speech check checks only your skill level? You don't need to take a perk for that

I see OP's point now, and I agree with him. Playing the game the way it's meant to be played should not break the experience, and each path should be as viable as the other paths