General:

• Cap [fortify magic school] at 50%, excluding the perk. So you can have 75% reduction in total with the perk. You shouldn't be able to have free spells, this would make the reduction perks always useful.
  
• As of now, enemies as they scale get bonuses to their health, rather than armor rating, this can be a problem for destruction. It would be better if they gave enemies better armor (possibly with smithing bonuses, so it could be at fine/superior level etc) as you level up, and give them magic resist. Also give dragons armor rating, as of now they have none, instead have huge health. Give them less health and more damage/magic resist.
  
• Introduce the cripple effect from fallout, with consequences from being crippled in a certain area.
  
• More diseases possible, introduce ones that damage the use of magic.
  
• Enemies and you should take localised damage, if you hit them in the head it should do more damage etc. Legs and arms should take less damage.
  
• Enemies and you have a bigger reaction to where they are hit, if you hit them in the arm, the combat effectiveness of that arm is reduced momentarily. If your hit in the face then you should stagger etc.
  
• Remove the ability to heavily exploit crafting creating godly weapons, also remove the restoration glitch.

Armor:

• A bonus to wearing robes instead of armor for magic users, possibly a -magic regen rate when wearing armor or a +magic consumption cost.
  
• You should never be able to move as fast with light/heavy armor, than clothing. The perk that removes the movement penalty should be reduced to -50% movement penalty.

Destruction:

• Reduce magicka costs for the spells, it's fine at novice and apprentice level, but once you get to adept, expert and master they start costing huge amounts even with the perk. At the moment the expert destruction spells cost more than the expert conjuration spells, which is ridiculous IMO. The destruction adept/expert/master spells should cost 1/2, possibly 1/4 of the other magic schools. This is because you have to keep casting destruction spells to cause harm, all you need to do in conjuration is cast once. This combined with point 1 of general, will make destruction more balanced.
  
• Give the stagger dual cast effect a % change to work, rather than every time. I think 50% would be okay, you can't then endlessly stagger the enemy.
  
• Increase the effectiveness of the +damage perks, have the same system as all other combat skills. Remove the 6 perks they have already, replace that with 5 perks that increase damage to 20/40/60/80/100% depending on the perk, that perk will effect all destruction spells. Then the 3 element related perks would come of that tree (frost paralyse, fire fear etc)
  
• Give enemies more weaknesses to elements, allowing you to have to choose wisely to do more damage.
  
• Point 2 of general, this will allow destruction to do more damage at high levels.
  
• Remove the fear link of fire spells (even without the perk), when combined with the illusion +fear perk it adds 10 damage to all fire spells. Removing this would balance the elements.

Conjuration:

• Allow the dead thrall and expert level zombie spell to work at higher levels. The cap for dead thrall is level 40, you should this spell on all human enemies you kill. The expert level zombie spell should be able to work on everything that can be risen (dragons are immune).

Restoration:

• Increase the effectiveness of the [repel undead] spells, you should be able to affect every undead you come across with the master spells when you have the perk. IIRC the perk increases effectiveness by 25%, increasing this to 50% would make it more viable at high levels.

Illusion:

• Allow the master spells to be dual cast like the alteration master spell dragonhide. So you can use it on everything that isn't immune (dragons). As of now, at high levels, the master spells even with the perks and being a vampire don't work at high levels. This won't be overpowered as they it costs a lot to dual cast master spells.

Alteration:

• Increase the effectiveness of the mage armor perk, change it to x2/3/4 with the perks. Making it more viable instead of armor.
  
• Increase the duration of the spells, as of now you can dual cast ebony flesh for ~200 seconds with the duration perk and dragonhide dual cast is 99 seconds. This should be increased to 400-500 seconds with ebonyflesh and 200-250 seconds of dragonhide, with the perk when dual cast.

Melee/Archery:

• Have a stamina cost for everything, swinging your weapon normally and pulling the string back on your bow. Not just power attacks and zooming in. Then change the enchantment [fortify 1h, 2h or bow damage] to [stamina reduction], point 1 of general would apply here. They did this with blocking, you need stamina to block, but they didn't do it with melee. This will mean more tactics involved than just hack and slash, for you and the enemy.
  
• Introduce a perk, 80 skill requirement, for 1h 2h and archery that reduces stamina cost by 50% for all weapons of that category. This would only apply for normal attacks, power attacks still cost the same.
  
• You should have to have the right amount of stamina to do a power attack, at the moment you can a huge power swing with 1 stamina, you can't do this with magic so you shouldn't be able to do it here.
  
• Fix the useless perks for swords, 1h and 2h. The critical damage at the moment is half the base damage, for a daedric sword ~8, this is nothing. It should be changed to a third of the damage of the weapon.
  
• Change the bleeding effect of axes to a % of the enemy health over time, then it is effective at high levels.
  
• Point 2 of general will fix the uselessness of the mace ignore armor perk.

Block:

• The last block perk is very overpowered, maybe change the effect to prolong stagger effect whilst running with the shield. At the moment, it knocks all enemies up into the air, leaving them helpless.
  
• Reduce the stamina cost of blocking, have a stronger link to the amount of damage you are blocking and stamina cost.

Just some ideas, your thoughts? The title should be 'improving the combat skills in skyrim'.

Anyone have any thoughts on this?

Too much. But I think Mages should gain a bonus from wearing cloth, yes.

I really like General Point 2, they did it with the Drauger Weapons that had two different versions, I wouldn't mind seeing a Regular Version of a weapon and a Honed version of a weapon, although if that is done then Smithing needs to be Balanced a bit. Maybe not have as large of an increase in Weapons and Armor damage when you smith. Armor Point 2 is kinda useless because I could just pick up the Steed Stone, not to mention the previous games had ranks where you could freely move in Armor regardless of Weight. I do agree that Spells should have their Magicka lowered by at least 50 Points for Adept.

No, because you can't fix what's not broken.

I don't know what glitches you are experiencing, but my combat is flawless. No broken mechanics at all. I kill things quite efficiently.

This one I agree with.

I was sort of dissapointed that they didn't have both light and heavy versions for the craftable armors

Why not allow enemies to have improved weapons and armor? Makes sense, bandits often have forges etc in their camps.

I meant the steed stone to, I honestly don't think wearing full heavy armor should ever be weightless and have no movement penalty, -50% for the perk or the stone. If you had both it would then be -75%.

I don't have any glitches. I'm not saying implement every single one of those points, just throwing some ideas out.

Playing as a destruction mage on master is difficult compared to melee for example, I put some fixes which could balance the skills.

Most of them are minor points to be honest, which IMO would improve the game. I really think melee/archery should have stamina cost, magic does, blocking does, melee/archery should.

they do though

No they don't, it's much better for players to use heavy armor and enchanting. I use cloth as it's more challenging, but heavy armor+enchanting easily the better option. The only good thing, is the archmage robes unique enchantments and the magicka regen rate from master robes. The only benefits. It's not good enough IMO, they need to improve the alteration mage armor perk and the duration of the flesh spells.

Double armour rating from stone/oak/ebony flesh is quite enough of a 'clothing only' incentive in my opinion.

I agree with a lot of this. I think for cloth wearers, the magic bonus should be pretty significant, like maybe a destruction perk that offers +50% damage if you are not wearing armor, a conjuration perk for +50% duration (or maybe higher level summons), higher level illusion spells, etc. Just giving you more effective mage armor is a poor incentive, since you could still get higher and more reliable damage resistance by wearing armor. Also to keep things interesting, I wouldn't mind seeing the ability to dodge if you are not wearing armor - that would make an unarmored spellsword character more viable, cast a mage armor spell for a bit of damage resistance, but mostly just try to dodge out of the way. It should really be possible to create an ultra high damage, zero damage resistance mage character. Maybe armor weight could also increase melee stamina cost or reduce melee damage dealt a bit to allow non-mage glass cannons.

Point 7 in General needs to sort of be elaborated on, since smithing and enchanting have such a huge combined effect on damage. The improvements from smithing should be cut in half or a third or so. Fortify enchanting potions should be removed entirely, and fortify smithing potions and gear should be much weaker. The +damage, +block and +sneak enchantments should also be reduced to about a third. There should also be +destruction damage enchantments of roughly the same magnitude as the melee/archery ones.

I was going to go on about point 7, but I tried to stick to the combat side of it. If they removed the fortify enchanting potion, you could create +25% alchemy and smithing gear, x4 is 100% so that isn't to bad. Then you can make a potion of around +100% smithing, which isn't to bad tbh. Good idea.

If they changed the +damage enchantment to reduce stamina cost (along with point 1 of melee), then you couldn't have massively powerful weapons that do 1000 damage. Then possibly add another +damage enchant for melee, but you could also add another enchantment for the magic school, to boost the power of the spells.

Melee:
Disagree with point 1 - every RPG needs a weak normal attack that costs nothing. So maybe just reduce damage from non-power attacks, if anything. So no point 2 either.
Point 4: critical hits do A LOT more damage on my end, so idk where this "useless" comes from...

More or less agree with everything else.

Well they do half the base damage, the base damage of a daedric sword is 8 IIRC. So +8 damage, that really isn't much. The sprint attack that does double critical damage, that can be okay, but it's still pitiful at high levels.

I'm not saying make them hugely stamina costly, just something. Why do you need stamina to block, no stamina > no blocking. No magicka > no spell casting. It makes sense.

I think mages just need spellmaking.


Anyways OP, did you know that bumping your thread sooner than 3 hours after its creation is a potentially bannable offense?

Because you bumped it too soon. That counts as spam.

43 minutes after I posted it...

It's not like I had a spoiler in the title, or was abusive to people, both of which seem to happen a lot. Chill.

Still, it counts as spam according to the forums rules, regardless of the lack of trolling or spoilers that count as separate offenses.

Though, I must say your ideas do have some merit.

Sorry, I didn't know the rule, I thought 43 minutes was sufficient.

It's okay. I don't think the Mods are caring that much.

It's more of a rule that's overlooked.

Still, it's good to spread awareness of it.

Due to the enchanting/alchemy loop you can have an item that say increases magicka and magicka regeneration by a thousand. Making a single or a couple schools magic free doesn't mean much. So it would probably be a good balance change as you suggested. However its not an exploit you can really do on accident so there is no need to change it.

Destruction would need a big boost in damage to offset changing the maximum cost reduction to 75%. I'd actualy advice 85% reduction as the cap as most everything else caps then.

Unless your intentionally trying to pointlessly get to level 80. Dual casting the expert level spells should effect all enemies who aren't immune like dragons. This includes vampires as they apparently still qualify as people. The mastery level spells themselves should simply have there level doubled.

No you are reducing the magicka cost of the spell to begin with as well, so that helps. You don't need much more damage than the 100% instead of 50%, trust me. I play destruction mage on master, the biggest problem is magicka.

You can do the restoration glitch by accident, fortify restoration effect is still on from earlier, then you improve some armor. It's a ridiculous glitch, needs fixing. You can't reach those numbers like you said by just using the enchanting/alchemy loop.

No you can't do it on accident as if you didn't know what the potion of restoration did you wouldn't be drinking it right before smithing or alchemy. And its only a real problem when you loop it. Drink a potion of restoration then make another potion of restoration. Which would never be accidental.

There is an original use of the restoration potion, to boost the restoration skill, which is used to heal. So yeah, it can be done by accident. Do you really they should keep it? It will be patched in the next patch, hopefully.

No it can't do it on accident because if you didn't know a potion of restoration would increase the power of your gear.(and thus crafting) You wouldn't be drinking it right before crafting items. You don't drink a potion of conjuration right before enchanting a pair of boots. There is no need to fix the glitch because your not going to create uber powerful equipment by accidently drinking one potion of fortify restoration. Its only going to happen if you intentionally do the loop. It is simply a much more expediant method then the enchanting/alchemy loop. And because the exploit can only be realistically triggered on purpose there isn't a big need to fix it.