As we build our epic heroes and heroines we all take a few perks that we regret taking. Which were the ones that didn't work as well as you thought they would or you just never used.

I'll start off,

• Arcane Smithing (Smithing), I ended up increasing my enchanting skill, so there wasn't much point in improving pre-enchanted items.
  
• Paralyzing Strike (One-Handed), backwards power attacks are hard to land unless your enemy is charging and 25% is just too low a chance at paralysis to bother using it, besides shield charge is a more reliable method of taking an enemy out of the fight. If you aren't going to use a shield I could see the appeal though.
  
• Shadow Warrior (Stealth), It's not bad, per se, but I can only think of two occasions the invisibilty has helped me and both times I was trying to assassinate an oponent I could have meleed anyway.

First build mistakes:

Arcane Smithing - same reasons
Bone Breaker (One-Handed) - It only applies to a handful of NPC's in the game.
Avoid Death (Restoration) - Always ready and triggers when I don't need it. Never ready to trigger when I do.
Treasure Hunter (Lockpicking) - The "rare" treasure is items like "Steel Helmet of the ___". By the time I had spent the perk on this, I didn't need any of the enchants nor the gold. None of the items were ever an upgrade.
Master Trader (Speech) - Already bought before discovery of the Riverwood Trader investing trick.
Any Heavy Armor perk - never again.


Second Build: Did it right.

I always take Arcnae Enchanting. I found it useful.


Wax Key-Sounds good, but uh rather pointless.


Only one I can think of off the top of my head right now, not running the game ATM.

Any armor perk whatsoever, with smithing and alchemy I was able to get a dragonscale set to over 700 with my light armor skill at 100 with no perks. Also, with Juggernaut 3/5 and heavy armor 100, my regular use daedric set has a rating of 1288, total waste.

Snakeblood and Purity

Same with the Arcane Smithing, I took it to improve my shrouded armor before I knew better

Light Fingers, your skill easily dictates pickpocket success. The exception to this is the first rank so you can get to Extra Pockets or whatever its called

Any mage perks, I started my first character as a high elf because I wanted to play as a mage until I realized it was fairly limiting.

Any Destruction Perks.

Master Level Reduction Perks(Any School)

Bound Weapon Perks

Dragon Smithing.

Mage Armour (Ebony Mail is soooo much better)

Sneak Perks other then the 1st Ranked one and DMG bonuses.

Axe Perks

All Lockpicking perks

All but the first ranked perk of PP.

conditioning (and perks leading up to it)
all the speech perks I got so my mage would be "rich" (have more money than I know what to do with even on characters with no perks in speech)
dual-casting in any school

I also take Arcane Smithing. I rarely (if ever) put anything into Enchanting, and I really like having the Ancient Shrouded Armor stats maxed out as high as I can get them, so I do use Arcane Smithing pretty frequently.

Wax Key is good for businesses and residences, other than that doors don't lock again until the cell resets. So if you don't want to have to keep picking the same lock of a business or someone's house, then Wax Key can come in handy.

IMHO of course.

Destruction perks on my warrior ... I initially thought that BLOCK was crap so I was running around with Sword and Spell at most times. At lower levels this seemed like a useful enough combination. After I played for a while though the sword damage way outpaced the destruction damage I could wield with my [large for a warrior] mana pool.

Putting these perks in Alteration / Magic Resistance or similar would have saved some enchanting slots wasted on MR .... Plus the perks didn't fit the character so I shouldn't really have takent them anyway.

There are MANY perks "wasted" on my L70 warrior but in terms of role playing I'm OK with the other "wasted" perks.

Mage armor. Alteration isnt my main skill so its kind of annoying to load it up. Rather get a set of light armor even if it does mean perking smithing and light armor.

I actually regret taking any perks at all early on.

Its normal for one to hold on to points for later use, but i wish i actually held on to them longer, say at least level 20-25.

I started making a mace/sheild warrior and now i am using two hander/bow/magic.

Its great to have these options for change, but once you drop a point in somehting you cant get back.

I regret investing in Bone Breaker, as i found that not many enemies with heavy armor, and that dragons are not armored at all.

i still ocassionly use a shield; the magic restiance perk against spells and dragon breath are great, as is using bash for stunlocking, but really not worth it unless you are dedicated to sheild use exclusively. Its not for alternative builds.

All lockpicking perks. The only one that's really useful at all is "unbreakable," and even that's only really useful if you plan getting arrested a lot. It's certainly not worth the investment of perk points required to get to it in the first place.

arcane enchanting is more useful than i think you are giving it credit. i believe that if you dont have arcane enchanting and enchant an improved weapon or piece of armor, you loose the armor bonus that you had gained by improving the weapon. I've seen armor values drop after enchanting improved items.

I just wish we had more perks so we could take the silly but fun ones

And for the sake of balance they should remove multi level perks. it ruins the game balance when you combine all the one handed, smithing, enchanting, alchemy and stealth
and end up with the x666 sneeze of death !!!!

I mean seriously I m fighting with that kitchen knife and kitchen fork now ... I m just like Ysgramor
It border on ridiculous

The lock picking perks I found useful are Quick pick, and unbreakable. Quick Pick allows you to pick without having to watch for guards all the time. And Unbreakable allows you to turn in the Skeleton Key and finish the Thieves Guild The rest? I was picking Master level locks at the start of the game with no problem. I did so many of those in Fallout. Just be patient and slow. Unlike some of the previous games, lockpicks are plentiful.

I wish Silence was before the one that doesn't trip floor plates. I can see the floor plates and avoid them.

None, early in my game progress, I was forced to use one of my minor skill perks, I couldn't pick any perks from my main skills because my main skill levels were not high enough in order for me to pick a new one. It happened from time to time, and I didn't mind really.

why did you regret taking conditioning? I'm planning on getting it.

i was actually thinking about doing something like this with the chef outfit and hat.
Illusion to cause havoc and clean up with my utensils!
sorry hope i dont hijack the thread.

Arcare smithing is pretty useful, even if you enchant your own items. There are enough pre-enchanted unique items in the game -- daedric artifacts, faction-specific armors, etc... -- to make it a worthwhile perk.

Probably just uses the Steed standing stone instead (no encumberance for worn armor, plus 100 max carry capacity). I can see that, as the two perks before conditioning aren't terribly useful.

Non that I regret yet, except the dragon armor perk in smithing. I don't plan to make another dragon armor ever again over daedric one, I could have spend it in another % of heavy armor bonus instead.

You can get the steed stone for the same effect if it's really necessary- later in the game, when you have more money than you can spend, you don't really need extra carrying capacity, because you don't need to pick up heavy crap anymore.

Secondly, the two perks you have to spend to get it are pretty worthless, although fists of steel is amusing if you do any brawling. However, amusing for rare events is a major waste of a perk.

Perks I wish I didn't take? None at this point. However I could talk about perks I didn't take when I restarted:

Any of the item Smithing material perks past steel. 4 perks buys 3 extra points of base damage over what a Skyforged Steel Sword can do. Big whup. Plus the later weapons look [censored].

Bladesman. This sad-sack perk only affects the base damage of the weapon. Unaffected by skill, perks, smithing, etc. So 3 points has you doing 7 more points on a crit, if you made a Daedric Sword. Woo.

That sprinting attack in one handed, it's really annoying :/

I totally agree with you on Paralyzing Strike. Its way to hard to land, and it not worth it. You can just use Chillrend instead. =D

I learned early on that the entire lockpicking tree is pretty much useless once you learn how to pick locks well on your own. >_>

I regret taking Steady Hand in the Archery perk tree. I don't know why, but it seems that everything goes into slow motion, including me, when I zoom. Kinda defeats the purpose. Ofc, reading the wiki just now tells me that it could be because I'm zooming before the bow is fully nocked. I'll have to test that later when I get home.

Other than that, I regret taking perks in the Block and One-Handed trees because I hardly ever use them. Now that I've got the best perks in archery, I usually can get the kill before I get swarmed and have to melee.