Disappointed in Leveling System Flaw, and about being FORCED : V - Skyrim

» Mon Jun 04, 2012 7:17 pm

Why? Because Magic is under powered as it is. If I level up due to increases in magic related experiences, then at least my magic abilities are keeping pace with enemies somewhat. When I level up due to things like lockpicking, then enemies are getting tougher due to my lockpicking while my magic damage output has remained the same... making my offensive spells more ineffectual against enemies.

So magic isn't killing enemies quick enough because they've leveled beyond what my magic skills are. If Major Skills existed, lockpicking would not be leveling me up, which would help keep the enemy's improvement from out pacing my own.

...and then it spirals with more skills:

Because I sell the loot I find and everything levels me up, my selling good are making enemies tougher for me as well. So now enemies are tougher because I picked locks and buy & sell goods, but my magic skills are not keeping up because only part of my level increases are due to increases in magic. Unfortunately, magic is weak so mages are really treading water to begin with.

Now those enemies then inflict more damage due to my lockpicking and shopping so I need armor because my magic skills are being outpaced, then my armor skill goes up because magic is under powered and not keeping up and therefore enemies are coming in and landing more blows. Since magic isn't killing enemies in a timely manner and they're right on top of me, I have to switch to melee weapons, then my weapon skills go up and level enemies higher. Now the enemies are leveling from picking locks and shopping and weapon use my mage would prefer not to need in the first place and magic skills are getting further and further behind the curve.

...eventually, my poor mage comes to the realization that she's not a mage anymore and it all started to go downhill when she picked a lock.

[...or was it when she bought the lockpick?]

As a strict mage, you have 6 skills, your racial power and shouts at your disposal.
As a strict fighter, you have 6 skills, your racial power and shouts at your disposal.
As a strict thief, you have 6 skills, your racial power and shouts at your diposal.

A skilled mage/fighter or thief would be able to use those 7 things to great effect if they spent more time worrying about their game than complaining about what their character wouldn't use. Unbalanced? I don't think so. So Skyrim is missing a few things from Oblivion, but it's got just as many, if not more, things to make up for the defficit.

No one is forcing you to do things outside of what your mage will do, so really by doing anything you don't want to do is a cop out of an argument. You have spells that decrease enemy stats and increase your own, you have staves to enchant with multiple enchantments, you have summons. There is no reason to refer to magic as underpowered or unbalanced

» Mon Jun 04, 2012 3:49 pm

I really don't understand this bizarre numbers fetish people have. I blame MMORPGs for that one. Only grinding I ever did was one or two skill levels in Morrowind to advance in a rank within a guild not because of this obsession with the number 100. I shake my head when I see people boasting about this.
Yeah cool but did you you know actually ENJOY the setting? It's just not my play style and also happens to be a style that isn't catered to in these games.

My only gripe is sometimes leveling in skills I have no say over like Speechcraft and Lockpicking. You might try and do without the latter but I want to explore everywhere and the first one goes up whenever you buy and sell. So yeah I do see the design flaw in that. That's where I feel forced though I just forget about it and don't get the perks.

» Mon Jun 04, 2012 11:24 am

The premise that you need to be "high level" to enjoy the game is what is causing most of these problems. Give up that premise and these 'balance' complaints would all be moot.

» Mon Jun 04, 2012 5:49 am

Thoughts?? Someone please tell me I'm doing it wrong or that they are working on some kind of DLC that will help characters like mine add levels somehow.

You are doing it wrong.

I mean "grinding" in a single player game

/facepalm

» Mon Jun 04, 2012 4:55 pm

Level 81 is the potential, not the target.

None of my chars are going to see beyond the low level 50s and thats hardly a problem since the soft world cap is 50...

» Mon Jun 04, 2012 8:11 am

If all you want is to level and loot the go play WoW.

» Mon Jun 04, 2012 5:16 am

I just hit level 50 on my mage, and I still have plenty to do. The only skill I have at 100 is enchanting, and that's just so I can reduce spell costs. I didn't grind anything unless I was a skill point or two away from a perk I really needed.

The point is, Skyrim is not a race. There's nobody to impress but yourself, so grinding is essentially taking away your play time.

Sure you could spam 'detect life' to power level while you sit in the middle of town perfectly protected from any danger. But doing this will only cause you to whine to the forums about being 'forced' to find other skills to power level.

Or you could play the game and let your skills grow organically. Believe it or not, your skills DO level while actually playing the game.

Basically, if you're the kind of guy who grinds all his skills out, and then complains that skill levels don't go beyond 100...I don't wanna know you.

» Mon Jun 04, 2012 9:19 am

ONE set of QUESTIONS in OP's defense:

How do you level destruction naturally?
By casting spells on enemies.

How do you level one-handed naturally?
By hitting enemies.

How do you level armor naturally?
By getting hit... and the cheese is starting, because you can let enemies hit you.
BUT, and this is a big but(...).
Armor leveling should be based on level of the enemy hitting you and the damage dealt by the enemy.

Smithing?
SOME will say you should ONLY use ingots and ore you find. That is the wrong answer.
Merchants sell ingots and ore which you can use.
Fact is, you will never use more than 3-10% of the items you smith, no matter how you use smithing, if you upgrade to deadric.
Isn't that pretty much the definition of grinding?
Doing a chore to become more powerful without using effort or skill?

There simply is no "good" way to level smithing.

You can basicly CHOOSE your smithing level yourself, as early as level ~5.
With my first warrior, I finished smithing and enchanting before even starting the main quest.

Why is that even possible?
Shouldn't you need to LEARN smithing daedric gear before you're magically able to create it?
Some limitations should obviously have been in place:
For instance, you have to craft one item of every type in a perk below the perk you want to create items from -- or you have to find a manual of "dwarven smithing", "elven smithing" et cetera.
You should not be able to craft daedric before levels 30+.
Yet my level 15 warrior had full deadric gear, improved twice as much, and the only reason he was level 15 was because I increased enchanting by the side.
Obviously, I quit the crafting character.

Being able to craft dwarven before level 10, orcish before level 15, ebony before level 25 and daedric before level 40 will completly ruin your character.
You instantly lose any and all interest in loot.
Gold?
What do you need it for really?
You won't buy anything from shops, and quest rewards will be more than enough to buy a house in each city.
Besides, you can just enchant an iron dagger with a petty soul and sell it for 1000 gold (Banish daedra).

...
I've decided to START smithing at level 40 with my current character -- because it will only take one hour ingame to reach 90 smithing when increasing the skill in the path of least resistance that is within the spirit of the game.

Encanting is almost just as bad, and worse in one aspect:
It's grinding, but the gold you spend is nothing compared to the gold you get.
I always end up selling enchanted gear to merchants who have 0 gold just to get rid of all my useless junk that I enchanted to increase the power of my enchants to benchmarks; level 20, 40, 60, 80.
It pays so well that gold never becomes an issue.

This is a great anolysis of the problem with these mechanics. I agree 100%.

While you can RP reasons not to level these skills (I do), the fact is the mechanic is incomplete as it is. Crafting is essentially just a level up button that you press over and over again. There is no challenge. Your only opponent is the menu interface. That is not a good design. If your can restrain yourself, you can RP right over these limitations, and for those people the mechanic is fine. It's not 'broken'. It can be used to perform exactly the service it was intended to perform; but it can't perform that service without the player's understanding of the mechanic, it's limitations, and their ability to resist temptation. It is essentially a 'free gold and xp lever' or a 'free cheese lever' for rats. It's just not fun, and I think that's the primary objection that players have.

Players shouldn't be able to accidentally ruin their enjoyment of the game, even if that 'accident' is the result of an inability to control their impulses or to play in a way that is less logical and strategic in order to maintain some sort of hypothetical gameplay balance. That kind of choice doesn't need to be left to the players. The developers have the ability and responsibility of making all of their game mechanics fun. If it isn't, you shouldn't blame the player. Yes, you can make it work, but it shouldn't be work to make the game fun.

And that's coming from someone who hates grinding and min/maxing, loves RPing, and loves Skyrim.

» Mon Jun 04, 2012 5:16 pm

Since I play these games to level up, why would I want to keep on questingwith no reward at all???

What is really sad is that games these days of all genres are being catered towards people like you. This is why the depth is disappearing from games. It's being replaced with big flashing text every 2 minutes.

You feel "forced" to use skills out of the class you are roleplaying because you have this poor mentality that you only have fun playing when the game is telling you "CONGRATULATIONS YOU JUST DID THIS! WAY TO GO DUDE!" all the time.

Bottom line is while the game is flawed the biggest problem is you being entertained by messages popping up rather than playing.

» Mon Jun 04, 2012 11:31 am

So it looks like I am going to get to a point soon where I will have a choice. Either start learning skills I don't want to or run through the main quest and leave so much of the world behind. I could just play and try to do everything, but just can't see myself questing for hours and hours while gaining no levels at all.

Thoughts?? Someone please tell me I'm doing it wrong or that they are working on some kind of DLC that will help characters like mine add levels somehow.

Yeah well. The TES leveling saystem is just not good. That's all you can say about it.
It always will be exploitable, motivate grinding, be unbalanced and unconvincing to real roleplayers.

You just have to adjust your gaming behaviour for that game to have fun with it.
Consider, the level in TES is actually rather meaningless anyways, because of the level scaling. So you don't have to level up.
If your max-level is 40 with the skills you want to use ... well, be it ... this is more or less just as good/bad as if you'd reach 60.

Of course it's demotivating, if you're not leveling up anymore and already have the strongest gear. But that's the way it is in TES.

» Mon Jun 04, 2012 10:41 am

Lore does not excuse poor game design and creating Balance is a fundamental of game design. Nobody can argue that the efficacy of Magic use is balanced compared to melee. Magic is so weakened that role playing as a Mage is not possible because players will find themselves resorting to weapons a majority of the time. If you are using weapons for the majority of combat, then you are not a Mage. Bethesda neglected the fundamental game design principle of balance, that the efficacy of the Mage and the Fighter need to be on par... Bethesda has failed "Game Design 101" in this regard.

I have to take a bit of an issue with this statement. I play as a stealth archer. As a result, if I can fire an arrow at an enemy without being detected, they are pretty much gone. However, if that same enemy sees me before I shoot, and charges, Im in trouble, and have to flee, or try and survive the onslaught, usually without success. Do I complain that warriors have the best playstyle, and the game is unbalanced? No, because I created the problem with my own choices.

As a mage, if youre fighting with a weapon, then you would be correct, you arent a mage. You should have alteration skill to cast bound sword or bound axe, along with armor spells, and destroy your opponents if they get too close, all the while trying to stay out of their path while blasting them with your long range spells. How about learning illusion spells to cast invisibility so that they dont know where you are as they advance? Sure, its a lot more technical and difficult than standing right in front of your enemy trading blows, but that is the way things are. Mages are more complex than warriors, and need strategy and tactics, not super hyper overpowered spells that let them destroy entire villages with one incantation.

Its not balanced, and it shouldnt be. A mage should never stand toe to toe with a warrior and expect to survive trading blows, just like my archer shouldn't expect to survive sneaking through a camp and getting caught. Its a different style of play, and different styles require different tactics in order to survive.

» Mon Jun 04, 2012 7:24 pm

What is really sad is that games these days of all genres are being catered towards people like you. This is why the depth is disappearing from games. It's being replaced with big flashing text every 2 minutes.

You feel "forced" to use skills out of the class you are roleplaying because you have this poor mentality that you only have fun playing when the game is telling you "CONGRATULATIONS YOU JUST DID THIS! WAY TO GO DUDE!" all the time.

Bottom line is while the game is flawed the biggest problem is you being entertained by messages popping up rather than playing.

Challenge for you: Make a new char. Give yourself 100 in every skill, all spells, all perks, and what you consider best armor and weapons.

Play.

Report on how long it took you to get bored with the game.

» Mon Jun 04, 2012 5:36 am

I usually stop my characters at a certain level. I set out to make a character for me to level up non-stop, but then I end up liking the character and the current world their in. My wood-elf imperial archer stopped at about level 18/19. Pretty much same armor in the game, with high level ones wearing steel plate armor and the very VERY rare ebony armor piece popping up. I have a glass bow and a ebony war axe I got at about level 12 (Draugr Death Overloard, 20 minutes of running in circles shooting fire at him). The enemies in the game are pretty balanced to my character, not too hard and not too easy, and the NPCs can actaully last in a fight against them.

So you don't HAVE to level up, and you certainly don't HAVE to raid dungeons non-stop either.

» Mon Jun 04, 2012 6:47 am

I think people obsess too much about leveling.

» Mon Jun 04, 2012 5:51 am

why not think of it like this: what does one do when you have mastered a skill? you learn a new one!! i'm currently a lv.58 mostly skilled in combat(ie. heavy armor,one handed,block,archery,)now that i have maxed out said skills along with smithing i have turned my attention to bettering my ignored skills that would benefit my character such as enchanting, restoration,and destruction. that being said i'm sure i will end up useing skills just for the sake of leveling up, but for now all i'm doing is mastering new skills and trying to reach level 100 if there is a level 100 and if that means i have to wear light armor instead of heavy or put down my shield and sward in favor for a war hammer then thats what i'll do.

» Mon Jun 04, 2012 7:46 am

I think people obsess too much about leveling.

I'd say that's the MMO mentality corrupting single player games.

Uldred

» Mon Jun 04, 2012 4:24 pm

1-Magic perks are mostly crap.
2-Even if I held off until I could spend perks optimally, when I do spend them the mage will still be under powered and everything I said would hold true because lockpicking and buying/selling would still be deciding enemy strength when I do level up.
3-"Don't use the leveling system" is not a fix for the leveling system. Just as "use more melee" is not really a solution to fix the magic system.

1. Agreed, there could and probably should be better magic perks.

2. That only applies if you level up. You can, as I said, simply refrain from the whole level-up process until your desired perk is attainable. Your enemies won't get stronger and any skillups gained whilst waiting still are backlogged for the next level on.

3. Holding off levelling up is every bit a part of the whole system as anything else. If it wasn't, it wouldn't be mentioned in the game manual.

» Mon Jun 04, 2012 2:11 pm

Disagree, but i understand the frustration. There is nothing forcing you to level and you are in no way required to be at level cap to complete the main story or do every possible quest. Any area's yet to be discovered scale with your level. So lets say you visit a dragon site at level 10 and let the dragon be and return at 30, the dragon will be level 10 and very easy to kill, but any new sites visited the dragon will be at a more appropriate level for you. When leveling is completely (or nearly) halted this simply means you are at the highest necessary level for your character build , unless you spent points sporadically. Example: you are a sneak mage but have points spent in 2 handed weapon skill, or you dual wield swords but spent points in bone breaker. My advice is to start a new character, plan out your build better using a skyrim perk calculator and do NOT grind from the get go. My build will require me to reach a minimum level of 55 and i am at 39, i feel pretty good that i will reach that point and even go past it. Imo, never spend points in speech, pickpocket and lockpicking. Those 3 are mainly used for gold, which is not hard to obtain in the game. . I hope this solves your problem and i hope what i typed isn't confusing, sometimes i go off onto a different tangent.lol When i did said things the game was a lot more fun. Here is my ideal build for those curious about it http://skyrimcalculator.com/#31549. Hope that gets the idea's for builds flowin'! If this post was already answered....sorry, to lazy and tired to read the whole thing this late at night. Good night ZZZzzzzz......

» Mon Jun 04, 2012 8:49 am

I'd say that's the MMO mentality corrupting single player games. Uldred

You know what, I really could not agree more. It seems that people don't play for the experience, anymore, which is rather sad. For some people, RPGs are nothing but MMO, regatdless of whether or not other people are playing.

» Mon Jun 04, 2012 12:32 pm

Its indeed the fault of games like WoW which deliberately create a system where if you want to explore the content you MUST level up. Its a race to level so that players can excess the high level content where the vast majority of players are. It leads to the issue we see here directly with players assuming that because there are more levels they simply MUST get them and "max" a character.

» Mon Jun 04, 2012 12:45 pm

I don't understand your post TC. Not being rude because all of us RPG players suffer from it to some extent, but you are definitely playing Skyrim with an OCD MMO mentality. You do not have to unlock every chest as your mage, try roleplaying. My warrior has looted many locked chests but he has picked none, because he's too lazy and impatient to pick locks, he gets his followers to do it instead. He doesn't like the idea of trapping souls to feed magical items, and he plain doesn't trust magic to begin with so he doesn't use magical weapons, and as a byproduct doesn't raise conjuration. Try roleplaying and all of these problems you are finding will simply disappear.

» Mon Jun 04, 2012 6:15 pm

So, you're level 40-ish, and have explored 3 dungeons. Yeah, you're doing it wrong.

» Mon Jun 04, 2012 1:49 pm

My Wood Elf is just Barely Level 34 with close to 80 hours, in the game. I didn't level grind, I didn't spending any money on training, just played the game, completed quests, killed enemies, etc.

Probably, the best experience I've had, is that I wasn't just placing a skill point, in a tree, because the current trees I wanted to add a point to, weren't high enough in skill yet, to do so. I saved those perk points and waited till they were. I managed to get Archery, Sneak and Lock Picking leveled pretty evenly. I have no skills at 100 and, even though I'm one-shotting most enemies (with the exception of Dragons, Draugr Scourge/Deathlords/Overlords), the game is still fun.

I have only uncovered 60% of the map and only cleared about 20% of the dungeons. I have TONS of quests to complete. I've also been completing certain Guild Questlines using different characters classes (Mage for Mage College, Thief for Thieves and DB guilds, Warrior for Companions/Blades).

I'm not sure anyone here can really convince you. From the sound of it, you've really only focused on a Mage type play-style. Why not try warrior? Maybe it's not your bag. Have you found all Dragon Shouts, including all three Words for each? If so, great! Have you found all 24 Stones of Berenziah (I think is how it's spelled?)? Have you become the Thane of every major Hold and managed to buy every house?

These may seem trivial, but letting one play-through of level/perk grinding/exploiting ruin the other 80% of the game you haven't touched, may be a bit harsh.

Honestly, I'd say play a different character. I started out as a Warrior and I didn't like it. I tried playing a Mage, I loved it, but it got a bit boring for me. I tried an Archer/Assassin, I love it!

» Mon Jun 04, 2012 6:33 am

There is a mod, Elys uncapper which solves this problem. You can set the skill limit and experience multiplier with the mod.

For example, you can set each skill to be limited at 400 and experience multiplier to 0.5. That means you need twice the effort to reach 100 skill, and you can continue to advance pass 100.

All formulas work pass 100 skills so a destruction master continues to reduce magicka cost at higher skill levels (25% per 100 skill level) while a one-handed warrior continues to grow in damage.

The game has about 250 hours of content before you have done everything. No one can possibly achieve 400 in all skills in that time and you wouldn't be needing to change your playstyle in order to level. You should be just hitting 400 on your primary skill by the time you beat the game.

» Mon Jun 04, 2012 3:39 pm

just train the unwanted skills, use the smithing/enchanting skills to make money and buy training in the unwanted skills, allows you to continue to level and not break your actual character skills you use in gameplay