Confirmed here. My standard operating procedure is to spam double Firebolts and keep things locked down until they die. With a follower to keep other enemies off my back, this seems to work well, even if I do seem to hit my follower half the time.

I did read the thread. That is my conclusion.

I deliberately don't min/max by creating warrior enchanter blacksmith characters.

Sure, at the end of the day, you guys can piss and moan about "oh noes my freedomz", but I'm having a whale of a time, and all it took was a little self discipline on my part.

The problem is not so much Destruction's potency as its high level scaling, which it has literally none to speak of. It creates a situation where people under level 40 argue that they are doing fine, while people playing at level 50+ are feeling weaker every single time they level and, not only does it get to a point where you are required to have 100% destruction cost reduction enchants, but it you are also forced to completely change your gameplay from a nuker archetype to a summoner archetype because it takes so long to kill anything that you cannot do much without summons.

Your comment was just contemptuous for no particular reason and did not reflect the contents of this thread at all. I am sorry if you feel that is what I meant, but I assure you it is not.

What a fine sight you have there, lad.

Before I reply, I would like to say I recognise the pettyness in my own reply, but use it as an example of why developers didn't do it.

I've created game worlds for RPG's in my life, and nothing would leave a nasty taste in my mouth as much as creating a difficulty level for powergamers that involved mud crabs that decimate a normal person in one hit unless they specifically aimed for a specific build of character. It would make me vomit a bit in my mouth.

The Developers made an Elder Scrolls game, a game which traditionally has always had these powergaming routes, its more obvious now the game is simplified is the only issue.

I would be harsher, except a few posts have been calm, and well constructed, which allows you to sympathise and offers the opportunity to discuss rationally, which is more useful to game feedback than anything else.

Whilst I've seen no argument which changes my mind, which would be pointless to repeat again (I think I've written shorter essays), this thread is actually held together by the OP putting his point of view forward rationally and without contempt which is a breath of fresh air.

This mindset which demands that the game should challenge your intellect in beating it, and creating the build that destroys it, and feel unsatisfied because the series has never been designed for that approach is a product of the modern era, maybe TES will go down that route, it never has before, but please don't insult us by arrogant assumptions about this being a majority opinion without any evidence apart from personal indignation and a vocal minority on an internet forum.

I also take exception to comments that declare all gamers are looking to be challenged to create the most powerful character, because its false and somewhat insulting to roleplayers.. and this is a roleplaying game, not an action adventure. At least not yet.

The root of your "balance" complaint lies mainly with Destruction. You claim that it is broken and underpowered, especially when compared to min/maxing melee. Your entire argument of "balance" hinges solely on damage output.

Hence, my conclusion.

I don`t see the problem with crafting. It takes quite a bit of time to aquire the material needed to rasie them. That is unless you are doing the buy,wait,craft,buy,wait,craft thing. I think most of the people who are complaining are power leveling the crafting by doing that. If you just played the game and raised your skill whenever you returned to town after a few quests using whatever you found, you would see it can take a pretty long time to get those skills up there to the point where they make a significant impact on the games difficulty.

I think removing materials and reagents from vendors would wipe this problem off the map forever. But then people would complain that they can`t find ENOUGH mats to raise their skills. Imagine how long it would take to raise those skills with just what you find. Of course the powerlevelers would resort to additem codes because they cannot help themselves, even if the game was made harder buy doing so. But for everyone else raising those skills would be extremely difficult and more time consuming. That I think would fix your problem and then justify the skills being powerful because it would be such a burden to level them.

So you have normal playing interrupted by binge-crafting.

I guess that it is relatively easy to "break" Skyrim, but as I have said earlier, you have always the possibility to restrict yourself a bit by not increasing crafting excessively.
Most complaints about broken crafting balance tend to come from people who did increase it excessively.

What you do in the game is your business and I will not comment on that. However, it seems you power-leveled a skill, how is anyone to take you serious about "balance" when you clearly took an extreme route to leveling one of your skills.

Talking about overpowered crafting in a roleplaying game like this is [censored]. Use the master difficulty and don't use them. Then, come talk about your experience.

Like i said, what a fine sight you have there, lad.

The problem is that once you hit the a certain point in the game, Destruction becomes less and less viable, forcing a player who wants to go a pure Destruction mage to go another route, thus breaking the "being myself" part.

The entire argument of "balance" hinges solely on damage output because that's the only thing that Destruction does. You don't see a Destruction magic that turns someone into a goat, no sire.

Ah well see, now I understand what you are saying. I do, however, respectfully disagree. I am not trying to compare different builds with each others, but rather I am trying to find a way to balance each build in relation with the desired challenge level as selected on the difficulty slider.

The problem is that certain builds make the game so easy that even on Master there is no challenge, while others are broken in the sense that they are perfectly viable for a while and suddently just stops scaling, forcing you to radicaly alter your playstyle and your character's developpement in a way that you never intended nor wished for.

I guess what I am trying to convey with this thread is that, to me at least, this feels as tho the game is forcing me down certain paths in character developpement if I want to keep a stable level of challenge because of the massive inconsistencies in difficulty from one build to the other without touching any sort or outliner build, effectively rendering the Difficulty Slider completely disfunctional.

See the thing is that from where I stand, I was not power-leveling anything. I was simply using what material I happened to collect during my "adventures" in Skyrim. It is all a matter of how available the materials is vs what would be considered the normal leveling speed for such a skill. If you make the mats widely available, then you have created the problem, not the gamer who used the mates you gave him and in so doing broke the game.

I would agree with you if I had abused the wait-buy-craft cycles, but I did not. There was simply that many materials available. Most of this issue stems from iron dagger being as good for xp at lvl 1 as it is at lvl 99: if that iron i picked up eventually became useless to me, then you would not have any need to regulate the amount of materials available to the player, because you can regulate the leveling speed of your skill by requireing harder to find/rarer materials to advance further.

Let's play nice folks.

It's very easy to lose perspective in a place like this - but let's not forget that we're talking about a subjective opinion, about a videogame, on an internet forum. Differences of opinion are not only fine - but welcome. From now on, please phrase these in a respectful manner.

What may completely ruin the game for one person is almost guaranteed to be the best part of the game for someone else.

Well based on your previous post you went out looking for it:


I took this as your main purpose for a time was to level crafting.


I'll leave you be, but anyone who power-levels (and I see this not a natural progression of a normal player to focus on one skill for an extended period of time) has no credibility when talking about balance issues. Just my opinion.

From what you and others have said about Destruction, I would agree with you that the lack of higher-level scaling in Destruction is a problem. Still, it's a small enough issue that I can forgive the developers for overlooking it, and it's minor and subjective enough that they're probably not going to patch it, if history is any indication. Just wait for mods, I suppose.

As for me, there are enough viable archetypes in the game for me to be satisfied. If my Destruction mage is forced to start summoning in 10 levels, oh well. It's a shame, but there are plenty of other archetypes to try.

Aaah well I am sorry, it seems I failed to explain myself clearly. I simply meant that, even if I went to explore (the world was too damn beautifull!), I thought to bring a pick with me in case. Turns out there are a lot of mineral nodes out there. I got lydia to have more inventory space, but it wasn't specifically aimed towards crafting. In fact, I did not learn about the dwarven metal ingot being usable for crafting until after I had returned and went to the forge: i had picked them up just to sell them for general $.

As a general rule, I think the argument revolves around the intention of the game. TES games have always been like this, and the reason being is that the approach you are being forced down a route because you wish to maximise the statistical DPS is not the correct approach. In a marketplace dominated by the opposite approach where beating the game on its most difficult level is a badge of honour, its not really in a TES game.

The main counterargument, and there is no denying you are right, there are avenues to overpower yourself, is not the argument. The discussion is whether the game should be a challenge to your intellect, or your imagination.

Its the touch of self-entitlement that the challenge aspect should be the focus which rubs people up the wrong way. The arguments that this is done naturally appears to be weak, because its only natural if your focus is to challenge the hardest difficulty.

The concept that the true enjoyment of the series, was always the character, not the statistics, they were cool, but instrumental in the development of the personality of a character, not the entire being of the character beating a game.

Your opinons have been reasonably polite and well crafted which deserve respect, but I doubt a resolution is possible, because neither party can understand the mindset of the opposing opinion. Your approach is as alien to me in this type of game, as mine is to yours.

I think the only answer, is not for Bethseda to fix Skyrim for you and those who share the opinion, but rather whether the future of Bethsedas RPG's are focused on roleplay, not challenge. I hope its the former, because generally, roleplayed characters have challenge in the game because they didn't focus on the optimal route to success.

By being a single player game, the social faux pas of being min/maxed, or munchkin in roleplay, as a character concept cannot be contained, and maybe its the future of the genre, but to me, and why I am vehement about it, is that the type of game I loved, often reviled, reached social acceptability as CRPG's hid the stats and people "got it" and had fun playing characters. To see the genre being attacked by those who focus on challenge instead of character, touches a nerve, and I apologise if I ever appear overly defensive.

QUICK EDIT: I don't mean to say that you aren't roleplaying in a roleplayign game, but rather using a mindset that has never worked in roleplay, from the dawn of its creation.

GJ missing the point completely! Yeah we can do that, but there goes our choices! Crafting is OP to the point where just getting you only need 2 of the skills to break the game on Master difficulty. In Oblivion, you had to go out of your way and use exploits to become overpowered. Nobody would've discovered weakness stacking, drain/damage/absorb health for 1 second custom spells, or found a 100% chameleon suit on their first character without searching the internet for ways to exploit game mechanics. In Skyrim, you have to go out of your way to not be overpowered. I decided my first character would be a destruction mage who is good at smithing and enchanting. Nobody told me anything about the balance of those skills; I just thought that would be a logical way to play the game. By the time I maxed those out, I stopped using destruction skills entirely and laughed at all enemies with my legendary one-handed weapons. "Don't use it if it's OP" makes sense for clearly unintended exploits like 100% chameleon suits in Oblivion or getting daedric gear at level 1 in Morrowind, but it just hurts the choices you have in Skyrim when you're told not to use skills that seem like you're supposed to use.

I agree that there needs to be leeway for different character builds. The problem is that the whole game is practically an exploit, unless you develop a complex set of rules to avoid the game design. Which is the opposite of what exploit usually means.

It would be one thing if lockpicking or speech were trade offs, but they're not. They're waste buckets. You can pick any lock without skill or perks, and you acquire a lot of gold without trying. Standard BGS operation will be to ignore the problem, then remove the skills from the next game. And half the posters saying there isn't a problem right now will jump on the forums to support the obvious decision.

Destruction is fine until level 35 or so. From then on it becomes increasingly pointless. So it's time to switch to weapon skill or conjuration. But the answer is simple, as many forum posters will tell you--just roleplay. You kill opponents with sword or summons, and pretend that you're using fireballs. Easy! It's not a design flaw at all.

@Cerddor
While I totally appreciate the well thought out and politely written reply, I fail to understand why you seem to consider those two concepts (roleplaying and challenging gameplay) as being mutually exclusive.

That is not true. I am being forced down a route because I want to keep the game challenging. In fact, my entire argument this entire thread has been "I am being forced down a route because I dont want to maximise my statistical DPS, because that DPS would triviallize this game".

I would love to take up smithing because, hey, im an orc (a smithing race, lore-wise), and im a warrior (the guy who uses the products of smithing). To me it is simply the logical/instinctive thing to do with my character both in terms of gameplay (warrior using crafted weapons/armors) and in terms of RP (why would my orc warrior suddently develop an affinity for casting healing spells or turning invisible?).

Honestly I find the RP value of Skyrim to be a problematic issue on its own, one we barely brush in this thread when we talked of Speechcrafting (its a big enough subject for an entrely different discution). There is generaly a single outcome to quests with no alternative whatsoever to develop your character's personality. I am a Stormcloak, yet I cannot clear imperial camps because of immortal characters. I am the Harbinger and the Thane of Whiterun, but this guard just asked me if I was the new guy around. And I am not getting into the guards' telepatic abilities.

I agree pointing out issues without suggesting anything is not as useful, so I'll try to add too:

1) Crafting: You should be able to craft only gear that is according to your level, or at least make it very hard to surpass that default level. For example, if you're level 5 and can find in the world only up to dwarven gear, then you should not be able to reach smithing 100 and craft ebony so soon. Even with this kind of change, smithing is already powerful enough just by allowing you to improve gear better than normal and don't depend on merchants, so I don't see any issue with this restriction. Also you should not be able to grind your skill with only daggers, low level items should stop giving experience at some point. If someone really want to grind to be able to craft for instance ebony when dwarven is the current maximum merchant gear, then at least they should have to spend lots of money to do so by grinding expensive gear instead of daggers (even added synergy with the money-making skills here). Same with enchanting and alchemy.

2) Destruction: Destruction spells are really nice in relation to variation, there are single target, AoE, large AoE, traps, etc. But since you're obligated to use your higher tiers spells to keep your damage high, then in reality this variation is almost nullified. I would like to see Flames useful till later levels, since it has no similar higher levels spells. And to accomplish this, spells have to scale in damage according to your skill level. Also, I think that items should not decrease spell cost, but instead increase spell damage. This way destruction mages would be able to deal high amounts damage, but at the cost of having to manage magicka. Today they don't have to manage anything after crafting a few items, but the damage is lacking.

3) Illusion: Making enemies able to resist is not bad, but I really don't like binary spells that work or do not work. I would make the duration of calm/fear/frenzy spells to widely vary according to the level of the target and the level of the spell cast. This way a specialized illusionist casting high level spells would be able to keep weak enemies controlled for a long time, but not so long against strong enemies. For example, the ultimate frenzy spell would last 60 seconds on low level mobs, but only, say, 5 seconds on a strong enemy. In the same way, even a novice illusionist would be able to control high level enemies, but only for a very very short time.

4) Robes: Considering that the destruction skill and enchanted items would increase spell damage instead of decrease spell cost, then wearing robes could be a way to allow spell costs reduction modifiers. So, pure mages that are all about not depleting their magicka would for sure like to wear robes instead of armor.

5) Unused perks: Three money-making skills is too much. But since they're already there anyway... Money is too easy to find in the world, and chests usually are not that charming regarding good loot. I never even considered getting perks in pickpocket (other than additional weight), lockpick and speech simply because I never need it. I'm sure that if someday I scroll through a merchant, see there's a pretty good weapon on sale, and then notice I do not have money to buy it, then I'll for sure at least take a look at the money-making perks. And this is even worse if you can craft your own gear. So, money has to be much harder to acquire and easier to spend (even buying a house is pretty cheap), so that players feel the need to look at those constellations. Also, there could be a few perks in those trees that in fact help in combat or exploration, this way even the players that don't care with roleplaying would at least consider additional options. For example, lockpick has synergy with traps, so a few perks could allow you to disable traps, ignore their damage, etc. Speech has synergy with questing in general, so it could allow alternative shortcuts and solutions. And pickpocket has synergy with thievery and bluffing (sort of), so it could in some way give you the ability to distract enemies and help sneaking.


NOTE: Please notice I'm not paid to design games. For sure someone in Bethesda can make much better changes than we can suggest.

Many many gamers avoid TES because there is no multiplayer. Multiplayer is the future, Bethesda will join us one day. You will have your single player still, but there will be a multiplayer option as well

Atleast Skyrim wasnt a massive POS flop like Oblivion ( you know its true ) , just this time there are more +'s than -'s. Any idiot could play the game ( Skyrim ) and clearly see it was not "balanced" at all, at no time were the developers concerned with balance. It is about the lore/rp/sparkles. Skyrim was designed and catered for a console larping market and it delivered.

A lot of the replies to this topic are the reason why the word really devoted fan is censored. Constructive criticism isn't allowed?

Anyways, in a game like this, becoming overpowered is fine. My main problem is destruction being meh (especially since enemies don't see affected by this). Also, the massive about of bugs is insulting. A game like this will be buggy, but it's almost as though they didn't even try to QA this game or just decided not to fix huge/obvious bugs.

Anyways, even with the problems, this is probably my favorite game, ever.

People only experience this on higher than Adept difficulty, for which the game WAS NOT BALANCED. Deal with it.