This forum is full of so much silliness. "Look what I can do by spamming completely illogical activities!"

WHO CARES.

So basically, if you spend hours upon hours standing about in one spot summoning atronachs and then attacking them, the game becomes boring?

Madness.

I am sick of people like OP whining about stuff like this. Its like theyve never played an elder scrolls game before, and the open world concept is completely foreign to them. Seriously, stop trying to grind or powerlevel and then come on here and whine about it.

Go back to casting Soul Trap at a corpse. Oh no, corpses break the game! And... you FIND stuff on corpses?! Most broken inclusion in a game ever!

Hey, wait, you consider being able to improve your combat skills on summoned creatures an exploit/illogical?!
How so? That's almost an ideal combat training, would do that myself if I was on the place of my character, before going in to actual combat.

and, this

I beg to differ.

So would every monk in tibet - punching walls and hardening their bodies/knuckles and what have you.

So would the point of having combat dummies. In fact, I'd say it'd be even more effective training against a summon compared to a training dummy, because you'd get the proper feel for how to control your weapons when they strike actual flesh and such.

why are you so worried how other people level up? shooting a lot of deer etc is a good way to level up archery, are you gonna say something about that too? you need to just play your game and not worry about how everyone else levels up.

That's the beauty of single player games, you can chose whether or not to do this. If you are aware of it, then do it or not- and if you aren't aware; ignorance is bliss. -shrugs-

I think the poorest excuse for poor game balance is telling people to simply avoid a skill or not use it a certain way. While I'm sure all of us appreciate the level of freedom Elder Scrolls gives us, this a case of bad game design. You should not have to avoid something, but play the way you actually want to and know the game is properly balanced and fun whatever you decide to choose.

I totally disagree. You are advocating less player freedom - the player must avoid certain activities so as not to break game balance. I don't think it should be possible for the player to break the game's balance. In fact I would say that if game balance is breakable, whatever the technique is used to break that balance is by definition either bugged or itself not balanced. The player should be free to experiment with whatever skills and playstyles they enjoy no matter how absurd, and it should never result in the game being "broken" whether that literally means crashes or simply the trivialising of the remaining content.

I just don't see what the issue is with suggesting that game-balance-breaking exploits eventually be patched, unless you specifically want to keep "destroyer of game balance" as a "playstyle".

I want to shout this from the mountain-tops.

Amen

In the next ES game to avoid this complaint people will be required to play for a certain number of in game days before they allowed to level up. Someone will find a way to abuse the SLEEP/WAIT function

I've also never played a difficult sandbox-game. I'm not sure if there is such a thing. Only the racing sequences in the GTA series have been challenging. Actual crashes, slow-downs and script-failures should be prioritised.

But he is CHOOSING to power level. The Key part there being "Power". If i levelled up just my combat skills and offensive magic i would expect to be awesome sauce with those skills vs NPCs. I would want to be OP as I have power levelled to get there. It does not break the game, you have decided to go that route and attempt godlikeness......congrats you succeded.

Its not a case of avoiding a certain skill, it is maxing the skill every level - therefore that particular skill will be overpowered for your level.....as you the player intended

How is this game breaking? If you conjure an atronach and start attacking it, why shouldn't your armor and weapon skill level up? The in-game mechanic
is that you get better at the skills you use. If you're using conjuration a lot, you get better at it. If you use a one-handed weapon, you get better at it. If you
use restoration to heal, you get better at it. If you wan to stand in the middle of the city square playing with yourself, the game allows that.

It's not anymore game breaking than leveling up skills via dungeon crawling. It's the same damn thing!

The basic problem here is that if you get the changes you want made, it affects all those that dont want them...

They then ask for their changes to be implemented, and you get mad because you don't like their choices.

At which point we might as well short-cut to an all out cyber war to decide what Skyrim should be like...





And people wonder why Skynet wanted to destroy us...

This.
If you're going to power level your skills you may as well just use the console.

#1 rule for enjoying your TES experience: Don't do anything that feels "grindy."

There are 3 skills I think are broken in this game: smithing, enchanting, and destruction.

Let's say you know that grinding smithing/enchanting will make you too OP too early, so you settle for not buying ANY mats and only building the skills with mats you've found. You mine everything you come across, you kill all those deer for leather, and you soul trap everything before you kill it. Even at this pace of leveling, smithing/enchanting will be maxed well before any of your combat skills. At low/mid combat skills, upgrading gear through smithing is just ridiculous. Enchanting 100 offers you game-breaking survivability and damage output, regardless of the base stats of your gear or you actual skill at using them. In other words, smithing and enchanting are broken because even if you avoid grinding it, you're still way too OP.

Destruction is broken because there's really only one viable way to gear yourself to not svck, and that gearing strategy leads to pretty big problems. The lack of damage scaling means that as your skill increases and you and your opponents level up, it's harder and harder to kill things with destruction. They've got more life, your spells still do the same damage. +Magicka and +magicka regen aren't viable gearing strategies (try it past level 30 and you'll see what I mean), and that just leaves -% casting cost. This is where the game gets broken. Sure you don't have to go for 100%. But if you don't, you're forced to limit yourself intentionally, constantly thinking "hmm, is this % too hard or too easy?"

Conjuration, though, is not broken. Sure, you can spam it to raise your conjuration skill. But you can do that with illusion and alteration too. All of the other skills you listed are easily powerleveled without conjuration. Essentially conjuration provides infinite targets for you to practice on. As mentioned, essential npcs can't die so they can serve the same function.

Everyone grinds through once or twice. If you're too stupid to realize that grinding will ruin your fun, you're too stupid for me to care if you ever find joy in this game.

This has existed since Oblivion and it's a great feature at low levels. It's a free country, nobody is requiring you to use it.

i love how people ruin their game then blame everything except themselves!

Reminds me of a coworker that downloaded a diablo 2 savegame editor, then complained that the game was too easy and no fun anymore. Gee, ya think?

"But I was just giving myself gear that was already in the game!"

Grinding/Power Leveling is not the same as breaking the game.

Kids these days.

Honestly how hard is this to avoid though? Of the "game breaking" exploits I know of none of them can be done by accident. You can't *accidentally* buy loads of iron ingots and leather straps and then *accidentally* drop them in a forge. You also can summon atronachs and never hit them or sneak near them, etc. I strongly advocate leaving these "exploits" in. If I want an uber character or I just want to power level a particular skill to try it out then I should be able to. There is no reason to write custom code just to handle something gamers with some amount of self control can easily avoid in my opinion.

OP is mad he can train their characters skills.

You have played other Elder Scrolls games right? Not exactly a new thing.