UPDATE 1/31/12: Please check out http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1282462-wipa-detailed-anolysis-on-the-perk-and-leveling-system/page__view__findpost__p__20202597 for the redesigned one-handed skill and perk tree information!

UPDATE 1/28/12: Please check out http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1282462-wipa-detailed-anolysis-on-the-perk-and-leveling-system/page__view__findpost__p__20177427 for progress on my redesigned perk trees and skills for Heavy Armor and Two-handed. 2 Skills down, 14 more to go!!

UPDATE 12/27/11: Please check out http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1282462-wipa-detailed-anolysis-on-the-perk-and-leveling-system/page__st__30__p__19915636#entry19915636 for a detailed design document on the "pillars" of each skill, which will be used as a foundation for all perks, and design changes to leveling/skills.


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It seems like every TES game has some kind of broken, unbalanced or archaic major game mechanic that doesn't scar the experience, but brings it down to what it could be [img]http://www.gamesas.com/images/smilie/tongue.gif[/img]

For Morrowind it was the fact that the game was too heavily focused on tabletop RPG mechanics that it made combat tedious with dice-roll chances, for Oblivion it was the level scaling for enemies and creatures, and it seems Skyrim's game mechanic issue this time around is in the perks system.



The Idea Behind Perks and Skill Progression:

I believe the idea was simply to make it so classes are no longer a thing at all, and instead it's more about what you do that defines your "class" naturally. That every time you level up you could choose to further hone a skillset within your skill, augment abilities or enhance the abilities of the skill with a perk. Loads of depth within each skill and how it can be developed, so that the fact that there are less skills does not mean there is less depth. However, it had to be easy to use and be intuitive in how it worked throughout the whole experience the player had, from level 1 to level 50.


The Reality:

Unbalanced mess that lacks depth in a lot of areas. Despite getting rid of classes in Skyrim, its now more important than ever to dedicate yourself to a specific class specilization. In previous elder scrolls games, it was possible to play jack of all trade characters and play them well. While such characters were never masters of any of their skills, they had a lot of skills to work with, which made them slightly more flexible. In Skyrim, this isn't possible - "Jack of All Trades" will get completely crushed compaired to specilizers in one or two skills.

This is because of perks now becoming the most important thing to become powerful instead of simply getting good at a skill. For most skills, the number value of the skill is entirely useless compared to the perks that give you up to 100% damage bonuses. And to make it worse, the level scaling and difficulty curve is balanced expecting you will get these perks. AND to make it even worse than that, EVERY skill contributes to a level up (which determines how hard the creature spawns are), even usless skills you didn't want to level up but naturally did anyways.

All of these things tie together to make it extremely important to specilize your character builds right from the get-go. Ironically when Bethesda implemented such a system like this, they got rid of classes. You can probably see why there are plenty of people out there who are playing characters that are extremely difficult to play as due to not picking the right perks or skills to focus on.

Certain skills were also completely sidelined, such as Smithing. The skill number itself for this skill is totally useless - the only thing this skill is about is unlocking perks. Which is completely broken of a design system in my eyes.


Detailed Look into Why the Current System svcks

Lets break it down:

• Perks are now more important than skills. While perks are a great idea, the way they are implemented is not. Many offensive skills have perks are simply buffs increasing DPS - a role that the skill itself should be playing. This makes it so unless you specilize all your perks in a skill you will never really be that good in it. If you have 100 in 2handed for example but no perks, you will produce much less DPS than a player who has 60-70 skill in 2handed but all the perks for that weapon up to that point. Isn't it kind of backwards that someone with a higher skill actually uses the weapon WORSE?
  
• Many perks go against the "class" (or role) the skill fufils. That is to say, many skills have perks that eliminate skill boundaries that make the skill unique. Such as, Heavy Armor has a perk that makes it so the armor is weightless... why? Isn't the point of heavy armor that it is heavy? This unbalances the pillars that make up each skill.
  
• Your skill level in a skill isn't used all that much to determine how good you are in it. Instead, Bethesda offloaded this important duty to the perks.
  
• Every skill contributes equally to a level up. This has many problems, the largest of which being that if you are an explorer who likes to read skillbooks then you'll find yourself leveling up a bunch of skills that you don't really use. Not a big deal right? Well it is if every single skill point you earn contributes equally to you leveling up, which controls when you can apply perks to skills and how tough the enemies you face are. A player who only levels up using skills he always uses will be many times more powerful at level 20 than a more exploratory or experiemental player. While specilizing has always been strong in any RPG, in Skyrim, the game will kick your ass if you don't.
  
• Weapon Specilization, as implemented, is very shallow. The idea that you can specilize within each skill twoards specific weapon types you use most often was a system that got me pretty excited. I loved the idea that if you were good with greatswords you could still have a degree of skill using a battleaxe, but you'd have a nice specilization in greatswords as your "weapon of choice". However the current system is very shallow - each weapon type is only represented by one stacking perk that has a minor effect.

So what can be done?



Key Guidelines on Rebalancing the Perk/Leveling System

Here's a few points I feel are crucial in doing a redesign of the perk/leveling system in Skyrim, to follow in accordance with the main ideals behind the system and to allow for a more fun, balanced and deep progression system.

• First of all, the most important thing that needs to be done is that all skills and skill trees need to have "pillars" that establish what makes that skill unique, and what role that skill fills, and to never break these pillars when designing perks or abilities for a skill. What I mean is, that each skill should be a class in of itself, and fill a special role that makes that "class" unique against all other skills.
  
  For example, lets look at the Heavy Armor skill. What are the defining pillars that make the Heavy Armor skill unique? High level of damage absorbion which allows for tanking, however you use up more stamina, they weigh alot, and you can't be as manuverable in them. These pillars that make up this skill should never be removed, only adjusted, built on, or augmented. Yet when we look at default perks that come with the skill, we see the very roles that Heavy Armor fills being abolished. Perks like "Heavy Armor now weighs nothing" and "You are completely silent in heavy armor" are incredibly unbalancing in the sense that what makes heavy armor balanced compaired to other armor types is completely gotten rid of with those perks.
  
• Perks should NEVER assume the role of the skill. What I mean by this is that generally all things related to overal natural progression in speed, DPS, armor rating, and magckia usage should all be things controlled by the skill itself. Perks shouldn't control these things, only augment or add versatility. Why? Because it means that only people who focus on perking a skill will ever do good in that skill, and it requires the player to spend all their perk points on damage bonuses and defensive bonuses in order to do any good with the skill. This gets harder and harder to do as players level up more, as they begin to run out of "perk points" early on to spend, and getting perk-points becomes more and more rare.
  
• Weapon specilizaion should be deeper, making it so players can truely hone their abilities with a specific weapon type, but yet still be able to weild all weapons within the skill the weapon belongs to effectively.
  
• All skill increases should NEVER contribute equally to a level up. This makes it very unbalanced in the favor of power-gamers, and makes it so players who naturally level up certain skills will be weaker overall compaired to those that do not. While I doubt it'll be possible or fun to re-implement Major/Minor skills, I feel like a good way to address this issue is to make it simply so that increasing low-level skills contributes less to leveling up compaired to increasing higher level skills. In otherwords, If I level up block from 60 to 61, I would gain twice (or so) the amount of "level up experience" as I would if I leveled up block from 30 to 31.
  
  This in effect would make it so getting lots of skill increases in "minor" skills you aren't using don't contribute equally to increasing skills you do use. And as such, leveling would natually be slightly slower starting out but be boosted if you specilize. This makes the difficulty curve much more natural, and makes it so if you are a "Jack of all trades" you don't cause cause yourself to over-level. Mixed with the above guideline that all perks should never take the role of the skill, slower leveling doesn't mean you are inherently many times weaker than someone who leveled faster by leveling up their main skills only.
  
• Specific to skills that require you to unlock perks in order to use the "next teir" of spells, items, etc: this behavior needs to be replaced entirely and instead made it so the skill itself fufils these roles. For example, lets take Smithing, a useless skill where the only goal is to try and unlock the next perk, and it hard-locks you out of any kind of crafting until you get this perk.
  
  This needs to be removed. Instead, make it so you can craft any type of item anytime, but have your skill affect how successful you will be, and how long it will take to craft. So if you try to craft Daedric at 25 smithing, it might take maybe 30sec-60sec of "animation time" before you have the results, and almost a 99% chance of failure. Items will still be used up if you fail, and you'll still gain a small bit of skill increase even if you fail. However at skill level 90, you'll have almost a 1% chance of failure to craft daedric and the animation will either be almost instant or only be a few seconds.
  
  However to prevent players from just making any type of armor from the get-go, you'll need to have at least one weapon or armor of the weapon or armor you want to craft before you can start making the full set. In other words, in order to make a Daedric Longsword, you'll need to find another daedric longsword or weapon to "learn" how daedric weapons work. You will at first only be able to make a clone of whatever you find. So if you have a Daedric dagger but want to make a longsword, you'll first need to make a clone of the dagger (whcih will consume the original). If you are successful, you will unlock all daedric weapons for crafting, and then you can try and make your longsword.
  
  This does two things: Makes it so even if you have smithing of 100, you can't magically never be able to make higher level armors, and makes it so you can't powerlevel smithing to get Daedric at an absurdly early time. However at the same time, gettng daedric and other high level armors/weapons early is part of the fun in the skill, so the above changes would work best along side a mod that makes it possible to randomly find the occasional high level gear earlier on (if this isn't already possible). Another effect of this is that people will be discouraged from saving and reloading constantly to exploit the random chance system. This is because of the animation times - if you are low level and try to craft something high level where you only have a 1% chance of succeeding, you'll be much less inclined to exploit the chance by reloading saves if you have to wait through a 30sec-1min long animation every time.
  
  So what about the perks themselves? I feel smithing perks would be best based around whatever enhances the pillars that make smithing a unique skill/class. In other words, stuff geared around armor/weapon enhancements, making it easier to find certain weapon types, able to do more with ingots, etc.
  
  The above changes required to rebalance smithing/enchanting/etc would be so extensive that they'd probably need a seperate optional ESP/mod made all together though. Especially if players prefer the old exploitable system.

Anyways this is my anolysis on how the current perk/leveling system works, how it is broken, and how to fix it. Only issue is if such things are possible to fix, and how exactly to fix it in a manner that will be balanced. I will look into it when the editor is released myself, though I might likely need some help as I have no previous experience working with bethesda editors or modding (I am not inexperienced in modding in-general though).

I'm open to critques to my methods, and open to any ideas of how to actually develop the "pillars" that should make up each skill, as well as the perks that need rebalanced. Reason why I am posting this here isntead of keeping it internal is I feel like we can come up with a better mod by having an open floor discussion on the matter versus trying to do it all by ourselves [img]http://www.gamesas.com/images/smilie/smile.gif[/img] My goal with my ideas and guidelines are to follow in Bethesda's ideals and spirit behind the new leveling system, not to completely replace it. Something that seamlessly works well with the delecate balance of the established game rules, and works well from a lore+gameplay standpoint.

I reserve this spot for right after am done warming up dinner.

Now that I've eaten and read your post from top to bottom, I am ready and willing to fork out some minor suggestions. But first allow me to express my understanding of Skyrim levelling system.:
From an interview I read, Bethesda loved perk system in Fallout 3 and wished for a similar system in Skyrim. They've done the next most natural thing, they took perk system from Fallout 3, skill system from Oblivion and merged them together. You've seen the result yourself, it does not work so well. Mainly because Fallout 3 based itself on SKILL POINTS, for each level-up you gained about 15 skill points you could equally (or not so equally) distribute in weapon damage or lock picking, PERKS was a bonus, a freak addition to already working system.

• Smithing
  When it comes to smithing I have a slightly different suggestion.
  Smithing is not about armour or weapon, it is about honing a certain type of metal, you know it, I know it. There is about 10 different metal types in Skyrim.
  
  My personal preference for smithing would be: force player to visit various NPC's in order to learn how to hone a certain type of metal. Lets say you have risen smithing to 40, you are now able to forge Dwarfen armour and it makes no sense. After creating 40 steel daggers you are suddenly an expert with completely different type of metal.
  
  At this point player receives a quest to visit a certain NPC who can teach him more about Smithing. Said NPC can be a nice guy and teach you right away or force you to embark on a different adventure before he teaches you anything at all. This leads us to another interesting development, reverse engineering described in your post. After one have learned how to utilize a certain type of metal, he can find and reverse engineer armours and weapons that uses said metal to learn how to make them. I believe if we base smithing on know-how-to work various ores and mastery of metals instead of creation of complete armour sets, we can shape pillars from this point on.
  
  
  • Mastery of Iron - With this PERK all weapons and armours that use iron as main or secondary ingredient will be 20% better.
    
  • Mastery of Moonstone - With this PERK all weapons and armours that use moonstone as main or secondary ingredient will be 20% better.
    
  • Mastery of Corondum - With this PERK all weapons and armours that use corondum as main or secondary ingredient will be 20% better.
    
  • The hot pot - With this PERK melting ore results in 100% more ingots.
  This is my initial suggestion regarding Smithing, there are still holes in it, but its a start. I will post regarding other things shortly.
  
  
  
  
• Weapon Specialization
  
  The first step in the right direction would be to get rid of 5/5 perks in Archery -> Overdraw, One-Handed Weapon -> Armsman, Two-Handed Weapon -> Barbarian. Their damage bonus should be reflected by your skills level, not by how many perks has been invested in them. Making a 100% Archer strong without perks, but EXTREMELY deadly with perks and so on.

Perks should reflect your characters investment into mastery of said craft and should not be mandatory to make it useful.

My name is Hans and I support this message.

This is how the game is already supposed to work. Not sure if it's implemented correctly, though, or what the difference is.

I most of your ideas here, but I really don't like your ideas on leveling minor skills, and smithing. If your ideas on minor skills and smithing were not optional I would not download the mod.

My main character uses a wide array of skills and I've never experienced a problem with the difficulty feeling wrong, but I would rather this problem simply be dealt with by using static dungeons.

Smithing, I can approve of detaching what you can craft from perks, but the requirement actually go out and find a given armor before you craft it feels entirely wrong. Especially in the case of Dragon Bone and Dragon Scale armor you are dealing with a character that has invented the armor all on their own. To keep the balance and prevent level 1 characters from saving and reloading until they can build Daedric, I would rather that the chance to build Daedric be 0% up until a certain skill level in smithing. Some things are jsut impossible without sufficient skill. Low quality tags, like the tags received for improving equipment, could also be used on equipment that is built before the appropriate level in Smithing.

Also to prevent grinding low level items in smithing to get max smithing you need to make the skill increase dependent on the difficulty of the item being built.

What you really need to do is identify the perks that you would actually use in Smithing.

Great post !
I particularly like the #1 and #2, which seems to be the main problems to tackle on.

I'm not really fond of your smithing idea, though. I'd prefer the requirement being on actually leveling the skill - making for example items giving you increase in skill only up to their own level + X (adjust X to balance it). So, if you need, for example, 50 in blacksmithing to forge a particular axe, you can gain skillup by forging this axe until you reach 50 + X. After that, you need to create more complex items to improve.

You're wrong on a few parts. First of all, the effect of going from 60 to 61 in a skill advancing your level way more than going from 20 to 21 is already in the game. You can test it easily too. Just start a character, and immediately advance smithing to 50. You'll see that your level is suddenly skyrocketing. Way more in fact than if you'd gain 5 levels in 6 different skills.

Also, versatile characters aren't useless. But if you're leveling up one handed, two handed, archery and destruction it makes sense that you won't be as effective in combat as if you only leveled 2 handed and archery, or 1 handed and destruction. It's just common sense. You can take multiple skills from multiple disciplines and still be effective as long as those skills work together to get you a cohesive combat strategy. The reason it did work in oblivion was that minor skills didn't make you level up. Basically, you could master several skills and still be level 1.

If you make your character more versatile, you lose some power. If you make your character very specialized you become powerful very quickly, but you'll get into hairy situations at times. I don't think this should change.

Oh, and the idea of not needing previous perks in the tree to get to the next one is a bad idea. The only thing keeping smithing in check right now is the fact that you need to invest quite a few perks to get really powerful stuff. With your suggestions you could just grind smithing and then get one perk in the entire tree while getting maximum effectiveness out of smithing. It just sounds like a change you want to make a demi-god character.

Not OP but just reading this gave me some perks idea for the Smithing Skill.

-A perk that reduces the weight of weapons made with the skill
-A similar perk but for armor
-A perk that gives you a chance to keep some materials after making an item
-A perk that gives you a chance to get bonus materials when tanning leather, smelting, etc.
-A perk that makes melee weapon attack a tad faster
-A perk that makes the range of crafted bows longer (Can we even craft bows? I think I never saw the option)
-A perk that makes all crafted weapons and armor 25% stronger (Level 100 Perk)

Make the skill level itself govern the maximum level of upgrade possible, Fine - 20, Superior - 40, Flawless - 60, Epic - 80, Legendary - 100.

You could also deal with the problem of combining crafting skills resulting in overpowered equipment by making the level up upgrade dependent on the level of skill in relation to the default level required to make the equipment. So at 90 you could probably upgrade Daedric to Fine, but it you want legendary Daedric you will need an effective Smithing skill of something like 180 or 190.

This also results in the early equipment staying much more viable throughout the duration of the game for those will to keep upgrading it.

I don't think it's as bad as you make it out to be. Perks actually help a jack-of-all-trades-character, since you can do good damage with a two hander by simply investing a few perk points in the tree, even if your skill isn't very high relative to your level because you also increased all the magic skills and are fond of sneaking. If you tie the damage of two-handed weapons solely to the skill-level, for example, then the "accidental" skill-increases in other areas will hurt you much more.

Don't think that's true. Increasing your smithing skill above certain points allows better upgrades for armors and weapons.

Higher skill allows you to invest in better perks. If you level a skill to 100 and choose not to invest perks in it, then that is, well, your own fault. Although I do agree that some of the power of the starting perks (e.g. better block/stealth/damage) could be transferred to the skill, preferably by cutting down the amount you can invest in them (so 20/40/60% increased damage only, remaining 40% moved to the skill)

Well, that perk was in oblivion, too, the good thing about it in skyrim: It's not free. You cannot simply hit 100 in heavy armor and benefit from this perk, you have to invest perk points to reach it, giving up other enhancements for your character.

Not true, as far as I can tell. Increasing my low level skills by one point seems to affect the levelbar much less than when one of my main skills goes up.

I know this is mainly a comment on the current system but dont like ideas that add more random chance systems to the game as all it does is add more "oh that didn't work, Quick load, try again". Would be better with a mix of minimum skill level to smith certain groups, an equivalent to the disenchantment system and blueprints [blue prints collected via quests / purchased for items that are hard / impossible to find like dragon armor]

I agree in every concievable way.

That is wrong unfortunately. Such characters were never masters of any of their skills? In previous ES games the problem was that indeed you were a master of all your skills at the end of the game. If you got a skill to 100 in Oblivion or Morrowind the skill was maxed out and you couldn't get any better in it. Period. And you could get all skills to 100. I much prefer the Skyrim system where you have to decide whether you want to play as a specialized character or a Jack of all Trades (master of none). And not a Master of all Trades, like in previous games.


This is a problem with level scaling and not so much with skills contributing to leveling up. In a static world it wouldn't matter at all which skills you level, but with the silly level scaling Bethesda can't get rid off it causes a lot of problems. Of course you could tweak the leveling to make the broken level scaling system work slightly better. I prefer to get rid of the broken level scaling and replace it with something that works.

If you read, I state that simply because there is an animation you'd have to wait for (much like chopping wood) if you are low level would deter this from happening. Only the most hardcoe of players who want to take advantage of systems would bother reloading over and over if they have to wait through a 30sec or so animation to just see if their craft was successful. The delay would almost be non-existant though if you had a close to 100% chance of crafting the item - it's more or less a way to deter low level players to try and exploit.

And you guys are probably right about my suggestion requiring you to consume an exsisting armor in order to make other armor types of that nature. My reasoning behind it being like that was because otherwise players could attempt to make any armor right from the get-go as long as they had the right ingredients. This is pretty questionable, because how would a player know how to even start making armors in Daedric if he had no idea what it evened looked like? But I suppose making it so low level smithing skill would simply result in almost 100% failure, plus the relative rarity of supplies need to make daedric at low level would balance this out, making that little suggestion unnessicary.


I wasn't aware that was how the skill system worked as well. I'll edit my OP to reflect this

I agree with the OP and i too intend to look into the CK as to how the perk/skill tree can be improved but i also feel it is best to work with the community on such an endeavor. Put a solid team together so to speak.

I have my own ideas and have taken into consideration others ideas posted on here as well which you can see some of http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1281961-personal-interests/ < not all related to perks though...

I have said this in other threads but currently every skill acts as a primary skill and levels you. Which to me is kinda silly cause my dual wielding Nord who doesn't use any magic still levels from conjuration and illusion skill books... And that to me is just absurd...

Something like the following may work... I have stated this in other threads as well.

I would like to see perks completely overhauled. Perks are a great addition in my eyes because they add that extra level of character development. Its just that some perks are a lot more beneficial than others. And some become pointless after a while. Some perks merely act as stepping stones to the next perk but don't really do anything other than being a wasted perk point.

I am not a fan of 1 perk per level. But i am also not a fan of allowing the player to have access to too many perks at once. I would like to see more perks and perk levels (0/5 become 0/10 for example) with lower bonuses per increase but allow 2-3 perk increases per level. Some perks should be automatically given upon reaching the skill level (levels 20, 50, 80 and 100). I would like to call them Milestone Perks (these could be cross skill related, but still skill specific). and as suggested by another member of this forum skills should degrade with lack of use (degrading slowly over time) but under strict guidelines. A skill cant degrade lower than a Milestone Achievement, nor could it degrade to the point of lowering your player level. That would in essence allow a player to change character class simply by role-playing (stop using that shield and wield 2 weapons for a few in game weeks and watch your shield skill degrade).

In addition, when the player levels up he has to choose to increase Magicka, Health or Stamina. These 3 are like Parent Skills. Every other skill could be tied back to 1,2 or even all 3 of these parent skills as its 'primary'. Using that as a guideline i am confident it could then be used to determine a percentage that other skills would affect your player level based on what Parent Skill you increase at each level up.

You could also increase a skills percentage towards player level based on perks chosen. A skill of 60 with no perks will level you slower than a skill of 60 with perks...

Of course, everything is open to debate and dependent on the CK...

When it comes to smithing i have to agree with other posters in this thread. I like the idea of having to learn the 'schematics' of an item before i can create it. And then couple that with the Milestone Perks before you can improve the item. Or an approach similar to alchemy, eat the plant, you learn a bit about it. Break the armor down you learn a bit about it...

I agree that you are what you play. But without the proper instruction or training you will never become a Master at a skill. You very well could have the knowledge for it (skill level) but not the know-how or the acquired ability (Perks)

Of course, end-game everyone is a demigod. This is no different in Skyrim really than it is in older games. With 81 possible perks to get, you can pretty much max out most trees that are relevant for being a demi-god.

I'm talking about progression though. Progressing as a jack-of-all-trades was feasable in older games, but not very powerful on an indvidual skill basis. That's okay, some people don't want to play characters who are gods in a certain type, and I like the specilization you can get. The power came from the fact that they could somewhat effectively use all sorts of tools in their disposal with their average skill level in a wide variety of skills.

My problem is that Skyrim punishes players who DON'T specilize, instead of making it so players who don't can still feasibly play the game well at that point.

I have a friend who is level 20 right now, with about 6-7 skills he uses spread out. Each skill is about 45-55 in skill level, as he uses them equally. I would consider him to be a jack of all trades player. The strength in such a playstyle for serious gaming is that you can better use a wider array of skills to make more tactical choices. The problem is though the current perk system replaces skills as the most important factor in determining player strength, but yet the leveling system still relies on skills to determine level ups. So for him, he's currently in a situation where he gets his ass handed to him regularly by just about everything, making such a playstyle closer to impossible to play as vs. being more difficult or requiring a more tactical approach.

I agree to your suggestions there is alot of fine tuning needed for the level system and somehow I can't understand how the actual system should allow more freedom than before....

oblivion:
We leveled Character stats every level, those increased certain abilities like stamina and magicka regeneration and so on. This is now replaced with perks and the main attributes: magicka, stamina and health
The new system is a combination of the old one, only with the difference that we have less possibilities now, because instead of making it "only" skill relevant how fast you can go in a tree (also with adding new points), we have this ONE point per lvl up....

before you were able to choose where to go...if you wanted to do jack-all-trades character, you spend your time with leveling a bit of this and that skill and than had to THREE attributes to raise. Depending on your training you had different amount of points...NOW you get only this ONE point, doesn't matter what you train and sure...you can spend it everywhere, but only if you met the requirements O.o? ok....just to be clear: if you are already restricted to only 1 point per lvl, why are the requirements so high ? or why don't you get extra points only to spend on maybe "magic" perk "trees" when investing more time into that?

before you got those "talents" for every skill only with using the skill, it was a passive ability that automatically added when reaching a certain point. Why do I have to spend those precious/rare Perk points I get per lvl now?


so....I don't think that the overall system is wrong...or the idea is worse than anything else...it has alot of potential, because it reduced the abilities in a good way....uhm you could say, it's not streamlined, but less confusing nontheless. You can still work into it deeper if you want, but it allows you to still have the overview over what you want and already have.

Anyway.....in my opinion, there are too less spells/skills to compensate for the loss of attributes and the forced leveling system. Let "supportive skills" automatically gain their positive effects with leveling them, without adding points to them, maybe make some effects be possible to gain through quests(I just got a nice permanent effect from one quest already )
make it worth to explore skill trees actually and make it worth it to spend time ingame for leveling blacksmithing O.o


and btw. I thought Bethesda said in an interview that it's intended to have different strength enemies....yes, they are leveling with you, but depending on how "difficult" they wanted an encounter to be, they added something like a modifier to the enemy levels like "character level +3"

I would like to see some "not already visited fixed enemy levels" only on some levels, where you wouldn't expect the enemies to prepare for a war lolz or somethign like that. Why should bears be as strong as youself in elven armor and an elven sword?LOL

I like your ideas that you have but I feel like a lot of them are too drastic and game-changing to really be apropreate for what I had in mind for a mod of this nature. The changes I am suggesting are designed to refine and balance the current system while adding new perks that are more suitable for each skill, vs trying to add a new system or dramatically change how it works.

I'd love to personally load up a mod that incorpoerates the ideas in this thread along side a mod that does some of the other changes you suggested though Would be a fun combo!

OT questions:

Someone know just now , how the Skyrim perk system work ? I mean: It's like Fallout 3 / NV , where you can ADD NEW perks, with a result of MORE perks upon the vanilla perks list ?

Or: is like Oblivion, where you can only modify or totally remove the name/effects of (for example) Master level perk "paralize hit"... and where you can't add new perks upon vanilla perks ? (if i remember right, in Oblivion you can't add the "6th perk" to a single skill)

Is wonderfull if we can add new perks to vanilla perk trees... AND add totally new perk trees to vanilla trees perk.

I know CK is not out yet.... maybe someone has found the answer for that curiosity thanks to TES4edit and tools like that...

I agree with KorJax' s anolysis.

(sorry for bad english)

I guess the game feels balanced for me, because melee enemies hardly ever seem to kill my character, yet I almost always get killed by a single spell vs casters. My character has perks for heavy armor combined with spells unmitigated by enemies armor. That said, yes I think the heavy armor talents especially towards the very end of the tree are imbalanced. I don't know about the smithing, but armor talents definitely don't seem balanced. I really like being able to use heavy gauntlets as weapons which actually makes sense, or light armor having a chance to dodge, but yes the carry weight/running speed thing seems to cancel the point of the trade off. My character is level 30 something and had a mixture of pretty high durability armor, it doesn't feel as imbalanced as Oblivion, I have yet to see bandits running with top tier gear, though it may not be as balanced as it could.

I did like in Morrowind actually having to search far, and wide to try to combine together the most effective armor I could. Perhaps someone could add extra powerful armor in Skyrim scattered in non-random locations, for that extra sense of achievement, and perhaps more powerful enemies with that mod if that would seem too powerful alone.

You made excellent points. I'll definitely be picking up this mod for a second play-through.

Excellent, excellent OP. I read it all with increasing agreement.

Skyrim's perks were a huge disappointment, primarily for the reasons you've stated and also because of the general lack of depth and imagination they display (uninspired is the word that comes to mind). A glance at D&D, WFRP, or any number of other RPG systems is sufficient to demonstrate how many more interesting, balanced and game-enriching perks could easily have been implemented without eclipsing the skills.

My biggest concern is just how much we'll be able to cleanly fix and improve with the CK; if the effects are hardcoded or the perk lists limited by the GUI in any significant way, restructuring the whole progression system could be a real headache. I hope not.

I don't have time now to provide anything really lengthy or constructive, but I'd like to add a small idea that I think would expand character building wonderfully: "universal" or skill-less perks, which might be or affect things as diverse as powers & Shouts, character movement, item use, lycanthropy & vampirism, etc. Care would need to be taken to balance them against the effects of skill ranks, but it's the kind of detail I really miss whenever I view my character sheet the skills menu.

I personally like most of the heavy armor perks the way they are. I think experience and training should count toward negating the difficulties associated with heavy armor. Light armor seems more focused on not just negating the penalties, but actually enhancing the character. Note the light armor perk that gives +20% stamina regen. I really felt like I earned those high end Heavy Armor perks and they greatly enhanced the fun I had. Losing them would be a great disappointment.

Personally I believe high end Heavy armor perks should negate penalties (weight and movement restrictions) while low to mid light armor perks should reduce and negate penalties while high end perks should enhance the character (bonus stamina regen and maybe bonus speed)

Yes, this is my concern as well. It doesn't help the most I have experience with older CK's in Bethesda games was trying to make a big cave system before I gave up simply because their tilesets were too inflexible to make good realistic caves out of

I consider myself midly experienced in modding in general though. I've done level design and level scripting for Mechwarrior:Living Legends, which is a Crysis mod that won Mod of the Year back in 2009 from Moddb, plus I've dabbled in various 2D game modding endevors over the years.

I like the idea of universal perks - I'm just wondering how they'd fit in with the rest of the skills/perks, and what kind of perks they would use that woudln't be covered by a skill. Maybe the the tree could be labeled... attributes?

I agree with the OP. In that the Perks need to be reworked to be something you gain in addition to becoming better with that skill.

For example, I've been playing a mage/occasional spellsword character, the damage bonuses from one handed and the spell point reductions in the magic skills should be gained as you progress through the skill, the perks should develop the uniqueness of your character.

My main problem with the perks though is the crafting skills (alchemy,enchanting,smithing) I want to get better at them but because this games challenges are all based around combat I don't feel I should be pumping all my points into unlocking armor types.

Crafting perks should have to do with becoming skilled at that type of crafting, i.e. you can learn to make elven armor but a perk lets you make elven armor that is lighter and another makes it stronger. then you can improve it to legendary using your smithing skill, but it will be better than any other elven armor because of the perks you chose to invest into the elven tree

I will need more play time before I can contribute more than just my vague thoughts on this, but I will be looking for a mod that fixes the perks once the CK comes out.

Also I read in a few post that the GUI is flash based or that if you are comfortable with flash you shouldn't have a problem modding it, so I think we should be able to create all new perk trees and not be confined to Beth's basic system (not bashing Beth they did a great job I still stop and just stare at the landscape, and I have no game breaking problems with the game, but i can see this keeping me from completely enjoying SK)

My last character in TESIII, TESIV is always a do everything master of all-I own you in everything-collect everything character. And of TESV I'll only be able to do that with mods, so lets get cracking! lol