Master difficulty...best decision ever. : V - Skyrim

» Sat Jun 09, 2012 4:58 pm

If you're on a PC and like more of a challenge, I recommend trying the Wars in Skyrim mod. Link: http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=6176

I've just finished adding a crapload of mods and this one was the best addtion for me. It's only going to get more awesome after the CK is released as well.

» Sat Jun 09, 2012 7:16 pm

So after my first playthrough on Adept, I've decided to start again, but this time I've upped the ante. Turned off all autosaves (mostly for stability - on PS3), cranked the difficulty up to Master, and am forbidding myself from fast travel.

Best decision ever. For those of you who've played through the game already, you'll find those first few quests and dungeon crawls especially thrilling.

I fully agree, i'm a PS3 player too ^^, did the very same thing, and enjoyed it a lot

» Sat Jun 09, 2012 12:08 pm

Also do people actually see benefits (consoles only) from turning autosave off?

I have a pretty flawless bug free game, loading times are 10 seconds at the most on Xbox, has anyone seen improvements turning autosave off?

I did, but we shouldnt discuss it here, i'm just posting to aswer your question. When I turned auto-saves off, the game became faster overall (but it didnt fix the lag of long term play of ps3, but its playable). The loading screen time became much much faster! I recommend it, leave just the resting auto-save.

» Sat Jun 09, 2012 3:06 pm

I have no desire to play through on master anytime soon, but I started an Imperial Crusader on expert a few hours ago. currently level 5 or 6.

» Sat Jun 09, 2012 1:02 pm

The problem I see with raising the difficulty setting (not just in this game but in Morrowind and Oblivion too) is that it has the long-term unintended effect of raising the leveling speed of your weapon (since you have to hit more often to kill an enemy) and lowering the leveling speed of your armor (since it takes fewer hits for an enemy to kill you. In my games my armor skill almost always lags far behind my weapon skill, even on default difficulty. I usually don't pay for training so I tend to be stuck with this imbalance, something I don't particularly care for.

That is odd I have not noticed that problem, I just hit 100 one-handed skill and my light armour skill is at 97.... though I play on adept so no damage modifiers on either side. It seems to me that my blocking skill is lagging behind and I am a sword and board fighter, and I use the sheild bash a lot. Kind of weird that it is only at 76.

» Sat Jun 09, 2012 4:48 pm

i stay on expert. since my main is an warrior with sword'n'board all enemies are toys anyways, because they can't hit me at all. the only ones who almost one shot me already on expert are high lvl mages with this huge icespell, if i forget to put up my shield. so... the only thing master changes for me is like 10 seconds longer fighting till the enemy finally drops and getting 1 shotted by icemages, without shield up.

why should i do that? i stick with expert.

» Sat Jun 09, 2012 5:19 am

The problem I have with Master Difficulty in Skyrim is enemies do 2x the damage and you do 1/2 the damage, which isn't that much compared to the 6x and 1/6x you had in Oblivion. Would make optimizing enchanting/smithing/alchemy a requirement basically to do well on Master instead of outright breaking the game

but, at lower levels, besides better ai (which i would never hold my breath for) what would you do? you can't enter new high level characters, though, sub categories of low level seems obvious to me.

it comes down to ai. and i think beth is one of the worst, but, has got the low level master stuff right. and, that's it.