for me, each one of the 13 skills in the game should be "equal", y'know? at least as equal as possible. there should be a reason to want to increase each and every skill you've got to 100, but for how many skills is that really true?

aside from balancing the effectiveness of firearms (guns vs energy weapons or explosives for example) i think it'd makes sense to reward a character with an appropriate free perk for increasing any skill to 100. eg, get medicine to 100 and get rewarded with stimpacks that heal in 3 seconds instead of 6, or SOMETHING to make that skill worth maxing out.

while i'm at it, why can't they do the same with sneak that they did with speech? what i mean is, why can't stealing from an NPC require a certain level of sneak skill for immediate success? or perhaps you could still attempt to steal from them with a % chance based on how much lower than the required amount your skill is.

basically the point of this thread is - how can we make it appealing to take any/every skill to 100? so we can effectively base a character around any skill specialization.

Why?
They already cut down the perks to a perk every other level.
They removed bobbleheads and instead have implants which cost quite a bit.
They removed quest perks all together.
And Challenge perks are just tiny bonuses.

They cut down on perks for a reason, I don't see how we need more perks.

I thought the benefit behind maxing out skills made using those skills more effective. Good enough reason for me.

yes but the benefit of maxing out say medicine is ....what? a bit more health? where's the drive, a real reason to want to focus your character on being a medic ..... i'm not seeing it.....


yes it's a good thing they've reduced the overpoweredness of our characters, but, take oblivion for example, every skill is rewarded with a new "perk" every 25 points right up until one hundred. there is no reason whatsoever to improve most of the 13 skills we have up to 100 except for weapon skills because they have a REASON to get to 100.....

You are right on one thing. There is no immediate tangible benefit to maxing out some of the skills. Skills like Medicine for instance makes the game much easier though. I can't tell you how many times having a high Medicine skill value saved my life in the midst of a frantic battle.

As for new perks every twenty-five points, I can see the room for something like that. However I don't know how easy it would be to include that sort of thing with making characters over-powered.

Especially in hardcoe mode.
Medicine is great if you play on Hard/Very Hard hardcoe Mode.

Amen to that. The change from insta-healing to duration-healing makes Medicine damn near necessary on hardcoe.

The only less appealing skill ATM are Barter and Lockpick; yet we all know everyone loves lockpick so only Barter is in dire danger.

Problem is, Barter's impact is too low at the current game settings. Unless barter somehow works exponentially (i.e 5 times to buy and 1/5 to sell below 10, slowly become 3 times to buy and 1/3 to sell at 50......at 100 you break even.)

But even than people just play the game without using the vendor much, or "grid more" for caps.

Perk is a good way to help, there are fans of the Pack Rat perk who are willing to pour points into it; but currently there is just not enough Perk to make Barter important either.

Maybe for every point of Barter over 50 adds 1lbs carrying weight would make it more worth while?

Oblivion = bad example. You can also pretty much level infinitely, max every skill and stat, and effectively become a god. So "It's good they've cut our power to prevent us from becoming gods, but in [game] you get perks that encourage you to become a god" is not such a great argument. In fact in the context of arguing that it's "a good thing they've reduced the overpoweredness of our characters" it's pretty much arguing against the assertion you seem to be supporting. Basically arguing "Now that they've taken away godmode A, they need to start working on adding godmode B."

Besides...anyone who cannot see the benefit of Medicine has never tried to rely on Stimpacks in hardcoe mode.

The lowering on skills is so that you can prioritize on specific skills, not just making your character a god. It's so you're like another NPC, you're good at something or you're not.
And the perks, really? Like I said, it's so there's at least a little edge to the game.

If it's such a problem for you, maybe you should write to Obsidian and tell them how they should have made the game.

"The lowering on skills is so that you can prioritize on specific skills, not just making your character a god"

yup so why can't we be rewarded for focusing our character on a specific skill and maxing it out? i'm not one for overpowering our guys with insanely good perks, i find the game too damn easy as it is. very hard + hardcoe mode and i refuse to heal during combat - still not quite difficult enough! but there is no reason to max out half of the skills we're presented with, all i want is a good reason to focus my character on ANY of the 13 skills. it would increase replay value for one thing, which is always good.

Aren't you rewarded by all the extra stuff the skill unlocks? Like dialogue, quest completion paths and so forth?