How much level scaling?

Post » Thu Jun 07, 2012 2:51 pm

I'm a longtime Elder Scrolls fan (since Daggerfall) but just finally got around to playing Skyrim a couple days ago. Question: how much level scaling is employed / featured in the world? Are certain holds / regions more dangerous than others? Do quest reward items scale based on level? For quests where the reward is a specific (named) item, does the power level of the item vary (like in Oblivion)? Are there any merchants who have particularly good items for sale or does it just scale?

I would like to explore the most dangerous areas and see how hard the creatures get and how good the loot is, but so far I've been fighting only Draugr almost exclusively, and it seems like every dungeon is about the same difficulty for my character (a wizard/ thief). Kind of disappointing. I also haven't even seen ebony or daedric weapons on NPC's or in display cases.

Any advice for places to go / things to do if I'm seeking a greater challenge?

Thanks.
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LuBiE LoU
 
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Post » Thu Jun 07, 2012 1:56 pm

You will meet higher level enemies as you level up more. If you want to fight tougher enemies while you are still low level, look for caves and dungeons higher up in the mountain and go farther away from Whiterun.

Try Shimmermist Cave, directly north of Whiterun. You might find it more to your liking.

I read this article a while ago and it was helpful for me. You might find it helpful, too.

http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/34615/how-do-enemies-and-monsters-level-up


It works like this: Certain things in the game world scale with your character linearly, like they did in Oblivion, and certain things are "semi-static" and "semi-scaling", meaning that they scale to a certain extent, but the scaling has limits.

The latter one consists mostly of dungeons. All of the various dungeons in the World have a static, pre-determined difficulty which is described in terms of a range of the players level.

For example, there are a lot of dungeons early on which have the difficulty level "1-10", and that's where they'll always be, they won't scale beyond that, and similarly, dungeons of higher difficulty level will not be manageable by you until you level up some more.

This is also the reason why the game still feels very leveled despite having a different scaling system. A lot of the dungeons and areas that you encounter around the part where you start (southwest near the mountains) and north towards and around Whiterun are in this level 1-10 area, only slowly progressing more upwards around the edges of that area. For example, the first dungeon with a higher difficulty which can be reached with ease is, for example, a dwemer (practically the "tinkering dwarfen" race of the Elder Scrolls games) ruin that is accessed via two levels of caves just to the north-east of Whiterun, embedded into a small mountain. And once you start visiting the other places, you will usually have leveled beyond level 10 and the game world will scale fairly well with you.

An exception to that is the case of "cleared" dungeons and possibly areas. When you have previously cleared a dungeon, it will say so on the map when you hover the cursor over the location's legend. These cleared dungeons will eventually get repopulated after a long time (it's longer than just a couple of days, but I don't know the exact number), and when they do, they repopulate with mobs in a level-range that corresponds to the players level.

The actual level of the monsters inside those dungeons is determined by your first entry into the dungeon. When you first enter the dungeon, the level of all monsters inside it is "locked" to your level. For example, if you enter a dungeon of difficulty "10-20" with level 14, all enemies will be set to level 14 and will be locked there, so that if you find it too hard when you first enter it, you can come back later and try again with level 18, at which point they will still be level 14.

The difficulties in that case are clamped, which means that if you enter a 10-20 dungeon with level 5, all enemies will be set to level 10, and if you enter it with level 25, all enemies will be set to 20.

Also, the areas in Skyrim work roughly that way, too. In general, you will find more difficult monsters the higher you get in the world (near the mountains). An obvious example that comes to mind are the frost trolls and sabre tooth cats, which will beat you up badly, if you walk around in the mountains too much early on. But as opposed to dungeons, monsters won't be locked into a level once you enter the area. Instead, the game randomly sometimes spawns monsters that are a couple of levels below or above you, or equal to your level.
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Mel E
 
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Post » Thu Jun 07, 2012 11:57 pm

Thanks man. The link was super helpful, and Shimmermist Cave was fun.

I am a bit disappointed by the whole system though... doesn't really feel like you're exploring a world when everything is tailored to your level. Also I got the Gauldur Bow and for some reason even though I was level 25 it was the level 12-18 version and a bit underpowered (much less damage than the Elven bow I already had). This kind of thing (item scaling working out such that the item is not particularly good) really annoys me.
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Hairul Hafis
 
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Post » Fri Jun 08, 2012 1:39 am

Are there any merchants who have particularly good items for sale or does it just scale?

I also haven't even seen ebony or daedric weapons on NPC's or in display cases.
The merchants inventory scales as you do. However Khajit Caravans will carry Ebony Ingots and Daedra Hearts before others.

Ebony gear is fairly rare and Daedric is VERY rare. If you want full Daedric stuff you're best off making it. :confused:
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Jeff Turner
 
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