I've been playing TES for dog's years. I played a bit of Arena just before Daggerfall hit, then played Daggerfall for a long time, then Morrowind. Was working full-time at that point, and that was + an 80 mile round trip commute, so didn't really play a lot for a while. After I retired again in 2005, I played more MW, and then went on to Oblivion. So yeah, I've been playing TES games for a very long time now....

And over those years, I find that my choice of "class" (playstyle) has changed materially. I used to play mages or mage/thief hybrids. Now, I'm finding that light armored melee is my "class" of choice, with practically no magic. No, not a "rogue" type, and not a ranger either since I have always seriously disliked the archery/thrown sort of playstyle.

My toons tend to fade into the shade if a fight they can't win seems to be in the offing (those massive, heavily-armored paladin sorts.... etc.) In fact, they don't go out of their ways to fight much of anything.... They tend to train the armor/weapon skills with gold rather than effort. And they seem to be concentrating on Mercantile, Speechcraft, etc.

Interesting. I hadn't paid that much attention until a couple of threads tonight caught my eye and interest. I must say, this sort of playstyle is really more fun that being a lumbering oaf decked out in plate of some sort, slow and always behind reactively....

I used to always play as Wood elf assassins ALL THE TIME. But I now love playing as mages.....

Heh. Well, at least I'm not the only one.... It's just really an odd feeling.... I was for SO long "Silvermoon the mage or mage/rogue" - since the mid-70s, if you count the NPCs I played while DM'ing for my daughter and her friends using the AD&D pen and paper game.

I wonder if it's because I just have no patience any more.... mage class-types require a lot more thought to play well. Perhaps my "latter" playstyle is simply less mentally taxing.

I use to play mages exclusively in many old school games like icewindale 2 and the baldur's gate series, they were absolutely monstrous at high levels. Moving on to skyrim I have for the most part completely abandoned that mind set because spell casting vastly is inferior to weapon damage and only marginally more enjoyable.

Yes.... Silvermoon was a mage-type in all those old games.... But even in Daggerfall now, I simply can't seem to find it fun.

I always play a mage or cleric, if not possible then I play an assassin or thief.

Warriors have always been too boring for me. The only game I ever enjoyed playing a melee character was Dead Island, but that is because the combat mechanics were amazing.

I always go 1) warriors 2)theifs 3) mages because warriors are simple and mages complex and mages are powerful in high levels but skyrim made everything backwards mages are simpler than warriors and are really weak at high levels

Once a tank, always a tank. I try other types, and stealth is a hoot in Beth games, but I always go back to tanks, usually lawful ones.

I was always a cleric in D&D, back when I played, and I'm always a cleric in MMOs and most other RPGs as well. But in TES games I tend to gravitate towards light-armor warriors for some reason (I started with Morrowind). I've been trying to break myself of that while playing Skyrim, but I ended up with 2 heavy-armor warriors (tank? more like steamroller) being the main characters I enjoy the most (one of them does magic and the other doesn't).

I screwed up my first mage and my first assassin--the second assassin is going better, but my heart's not in it. I usually enjoy archery play (my first D&D character was based on Rosa from FF4--a white mage archer, besides that I do archery in real life and find it quite satisfying) but without stealth it just gets you killed quickly, and with stealth it's too easy. I still haven't figured out how to use magic effectively in this game without spending most of every battle in the menu switching spells (I play using a controller--I'm so used to MMOs that I can't handle moving with the keyboard and attacking with the mouse, it's just too weird), and that's not any fun.

Anyway, I guess basically what I'm trying to say is that my TES characters are always necessarily a 180 from what I play in other games, just because in TES games my usual character style isn't all that viable, and I svck at strategy enough that doing all the extra maneuvering just to make it viable requires so much thinking the game isn't fun anymore, so I don't bother.

Funny , I barely remember much of DnD pen n paper days , mostly because my parents arbitrarily decided they needed to go on a religious crusade and burn everything I worked 2 summers to buy and prepare for. My experiences with DnD was it went pretty good , we had alot of fun and I generally played lawful good paladin types. Then a kid moved into the neighborhood that sort of broke up the gang , and we just did oher stuff , how I wish I had the foresight to just tell the kid to get out of my house , but I never did .He ruined our games by cherry-picking impossible items to put on his characters from dieties and demigods and just generally trying to dominate everything.

Wow I played a warrior tank mostly out of necessity , but was considered one of the best on the server at it at the time. Most of my wow career after vanilla was a deranged dual-wielding dps god , I really excelled at it and mostly disproved every xpack people crying about warriors doing sub-par damage.DDO I played mostly my cleric as a healer with access to any damage gear he wanted for soloing. But the healer/support role in that game was really rewarding , you didn't just spam heals , you actually SUPPORT your party.

There's a huge gap in there for starting a family , building a house on my own , and working etc. So I went into this game playing a wow madman dual-wielder and ended up with a nice shield and sword and like that playstyle the most of all of them. But maybe you just have a need to get in some people's faces and smack the bejesus out of them right now.

In my opinion you can't have an opinion on a playstyle til you tried it yourself, on my main I do a bit of everything, jack of all trades, master of none. Basically I use whatever I think will help me the best in a situation, although since I got Wabbajack, that seems to be my go-to weapon if I am having a little trouble.