Equipment degradation does nothing more than add needless punishment for the player. It does not add strategy or challenge. It's simply tedium. Better?

Combat is a completely different beast, because ultimately, combat is what the game is built around, whether it be bashing orc skulls with a huge warhammer, or burning zombies to a crisp with fire magic, or putting an arrow through the head of an unknowing bandit. Dice roll, stat based combat was a means of achieving an end, and Bethesda decided on an alternate route in Oblivion and Skyrim.

There is no end, however, to weapon and armor degradation except money / time sinks and player punishment. People say it added strategy, but it was not strategic to have to micro manage your gear, and bang it with a repair hammer to get it back up to speed.

The argument about enchantments is also invalid, because it is not equal. Enchantments are additional bonuses, and thus, depleting the energy that allows for that additional bonus, and needing to maintain that to get additional bonuses is not the same as having your weapons degrade and eventually break.

What would be more fitting, and something that I thought was going to happen in Skyrim but didn't, is the bonuses you get from Smithing would eventually wear out, requiring you to continue to upgrade your weapons and armor to keep them in that upgraded form.

But general equipment degradation is just a needless time and money sink, and a tedious punishment on the player simply for playing the game. It's very frustrating to fight a mob and think "How come I'm barely doing any damage to this guy, when I just killed the last guy with so little effort" and realize it's because your weapon is degraded. It's frustrating and tedious to have to carry around dozens of repair hammers that encumber you and weigh you down to get through a dungeon. It forces you to level a specific skill (in this case, Armorer) if you want to remain an effective character, which forcing skills on players is supposed to be the last thing that Elder Scrolls does.

If equipment degradation returns, I won't [censored] about it, I will deal, but I find the stance that it is some necessary element to the game to be very - as you put it - disingenuous.

Yeah, I wasn't too dissapointed the degredation and repair system that was in previous games was scrapped but I was hoping in Skyrim they would have taken it to another level. You could carry a hammer and stone for minor feild repairs and shapening to armor and weapons but maybe once it degraded past a certain point it would have to be taken to a work bench or grinding stone for repair.

Also, I would have like to seen a more slower/reallistic degrading of weapons and armor, especially armor.

I'm glad that weapon degradation was removed. Realism is all fine and good, in fact, I encourage it. But if it impedes gameplay with annoying repetition that's forced upon all players. It's annoying. Plain and simple. It's annoying in Fallout (but tolerable since you can have some fun scavenging for weapons and killing a few raiders) and annoying in Oblivion. A lot more so in the Elder Scrolls since you're buying hammers. Not killing a bandit who has a similar weapon to you and just pressing one button.

As for the final point, yeah, I'm all for differentiating heavy armor and light armor. Light Armor should be what light armor is. An armor for assassins, archers, and the like. Armor that, if hit with a battle axe, won't do very much. It will block damage but compared to Heavy Armor, it wouldn't be anything.

I don't mind weapon degradation if it's done well.
Weapons and armor need to be waaay more durable than they were in Oblivion.

It would be cool as part of a HC mode (ala New Vegas) along with eating and drinking.

You have no understand of game design theory if you think degradation is a "Needless" Money sink, Skyrim sorely needs a money sink to destroy currency to combat the in-game inflation that devalues the rewards of the majority of quests.

I'll say that cautiously though, because as Morrowind and Oblivion stand, you're kind of right. They were tedious and weren't even a money sink, hammers being a nickle for a box of 40. But this changed in Fallout 3, the consumption and destruction of caps by the repair system opened up a lot more depth in equipment choice, and relevance to currency rewards. I was hoping Bethesda was going to learn from that and implement such a system in Skyrim, but apparently not.

I want to stress that I do not support complete destruction of equipment though.

I would love to see weapon and armor degrading return, but it needs a revamp from Oblivion's style!
Whence cometh thou, naysayers? Prithee consider:

1. *Speed* of degrading varies by metal quality and hardness. (iron=fast / dwarven=average / ebony=very slow).

2. Smithing *enhancements* increase durability.

3. *Perks* that enhance durability / reduce degrading speed.

4. *Elimination* of repair hammers (required skill + anvil or NPC to repair).

5. *5 stages* of item condition:
75 -100% durability - no penalty (pristine)
50 - 75% durability - 15% damage penalty (worn - functional but slightly noticeable)
25 - 50% durability - 25% damage penalty (battered - very noticeable difference)
1 -- 25% durability - 50% damage penalty (damaged - barely usable)
0% --------------------- (Broken - cannot use)

Simple yet dynamic enough to add a layer to the game's realism. Perhaps a valid reason to wear heavy armor instead of light?

How is this different than attribute pools for health, stamina, and magicka? The only reason for their existence is to limit the player, either in terms of how many times they can perform a certain action or how long they can survive. Once stamina is drained, you can no longer perform power attacks. That is punishment for not managing your stamina. Once magicka is drained, you can no longer cast spells. That is punishment for not managing your magicka. Once your health is drained, you are dead. That is punishment for not avoiding attacks. Diseases serve no purpose beyond applying negative modifiers to attack or carrying capacity or health or skills or whatever. They are punishment for being attacked by afflicted enemies.

There is hardly strategy in these limitations. The game throws several buttloads of potions at you every step of the way. All it requires is you toggle over to your inventory, chug down half a dozen brews, and you're back in top form.
Enchantments only confer additional bonuses when placed on specific items. Weapons, for example. In other cases, such as with staves, the enchantment is the weapon. Once the enchantment runs out, the item becomes useless. This is similar to how attack enchantments on various articles of clothing worked in Morrowind (and maybe in Oblivion, I can't recall for sure). Are you advocating for the removal of this system as well, because it's simply tedious?

In any case, why would it matter whether enchantments are considered bonuses or not. The point is that to perform at peak effectiveness, you are forced to maintain certain pieces of equipment. The actions the player must go through to maintain this equipment are effectively the same as those they'd go through to repair armor/weapons. The only difference is a minimum cap on effectiveness.
Equipment degradation is only acceptable if you're always performing adequately or better? If you can perform poorly, it's suddenly not an acceptable system?
Removing shops that provide smithing/enchanting for a fee was a weird decision. The only reason a player would be forced to repair their own equipment would be due to the continued absence of these services. With their inclusion, however, we instead of characters who are more self sufficient---able to rely on their own skill and save themselves some coin---and those who require assistance---a more costly choice, but frees them up to delve more deeply into other skills.

This means more character possibilities. You can play a character who crafts their own weapons, you can play someone who uses bought/found weapons, but handles the maintenance themselves, as well as someone who doesn't bother to concern himself how her equipment works, just that it does.
Nothing is necessary, and I don't recall anybody saying equipment degradation was. That doesn't mean that the experience isn't better with its inclusion.

Because it bored me, therefore it was a boring chore. Good riddance boring chore.

Staves are a method of gaining access to a skill (the spell included in the staff) without investing in it's skill. I can be a pure, non magic using warrior, and grab a staff of fireballs and a staff of zombies and fling magic around all over the place with no skill investment, thus it is limited.

Health, Magicka, and Stamina bars absolutely does add strategy - it's the strategy of remaining alive. If you think that having health potions completely negates the strategy, then play a "dead is dead" character and see how long you stay alive. Being invincible, having unlimited magicka, and having unlimited stamina is what is known as "god mode", which completely takes out any challenge and strategy from the game and thus takes away the fun of playing. Armor not degrading doesn't make you invincible, it doesn't put you in "god mode".

Removing merchants that smith / enchant was an odd decision, but not taking Armorer and relying on paying for the service is not very practical. If you've ever played Oblivion, you know how expensive it is to maintain equipment, especially when you start getting enchanted gear.

You say that the experience was better with armor degradation? For you, perhaps. Not for me. And not for many many others.


Essentially, this. Games are meant to be fun, not to be a chore.

I'm not seeing the distinction. Why does your skill focus matter when discussing upkeep costs of certain items? A staff can just as easily be used by a dedicated mage.
You are missing the point. The process for equipment maintenance is exactly the same as the process for health/magicka/stamina maintenance: when condition diminishes, fix it. There is no more challenge in fixing low health than there is in fixing a dull blade. You open a menu, select the appropriate item (potion or repair hammer) and apply it to yourself or your equipment. If you don't repair your weapon, it eventually breaks. If you don't chug a health potion you eventually die. But the results are largely irrelevant, because your argument was that the process of maintaining equipment was tedious.

In terms of strategy, I'm not sure why being faced with death is more meaningful than being faced with damaged equipment. It's not as if death means anything except in the very immediate moment. You're free to simply reload indefinitely until you succeed. Given the way enemy leveling works, there aren't many enemies where this isn't a very real option. When facing broken equipment, however, you can't simply reload until it ends up not breaking. Using your equipment when it's in a very shoddy state will always result in broken equipment. This then forces you to make do with secondary weapons/armors---perhaps affording less protection or dealing less damage---or you're forced to avoid combat until you've properly rearmed yourself. In this case, death simply results in better dodging and/or luckier damage rolls, whereas broken equipment can result in a total change in behavior and the way the player approaches short to medium term conflicts.
If you've played any TES game you'll know how much useless money you accumulate by the end of the game (even in those games that did require equipment upkeep).

Your argument here is weird. On the one hand, you don't like the idea of committing yourself to a skill or having to carry around repair hammers. On the other, paying money for the service is impractical. Aren't these two claims mutually exclusive? If you can't be bothered to dedicate time into improving the skill yourself, then paying someone else to is clearly the practical decision.
Fun is irrelevant. It's not an objective measure. You can't simply point at something and say this feature increases/decreases FUN by ten units. If we're going to sit around and debate purely based on what is fun, we'll go no where.

IRL means nothing in video games, that's the first point.
The 2nd point is of course this stuff was removed from earlier games because almost all RPGs these days are being "streamlined for a broader audience"

Weapons degrading and armor degrading is usually in the best RPGs but not mandatory. It all depends on how you implement it. For instance in Diablo 1 it's terrible.
In Fallout New Vegas, it's decent.

The armor cap is indeed bogus. But TES games were never known for combat balance