Hey guys so I'm looking at making a new char that will be played as a steathy assassin type. I plan to use Illusion, light armor, and have a nice mix of archery and melee. I've heard that 1-hand enchantments etc don't work for daggers? I'm wondering what exactly this effects. Do perks from the 1-hand tree such as Armsman and Bladesman still work when wielding daggers. I'm led to believe that 1hand dmg enchanments on gear doesn't effect daggers right?. My idea was to use dual daggers and pick up the dual wield perks in 1-hand tree. What does everyone feel would be the best armor enchantments for a char like this. I was considering using Illusion enchantments to make them cost 0.

Also was hoping for some advice on what perks are neccesary. I have very little experience with archery, stealth, and lockpicking skill trees and have no idea what perks are neccesary.

Thanks for the advice all.

You are correct about the one-hand enchantments and daggers. Doesn't matter though since once you get x30 backstab damage from shrouded gloves you will 1-shot everything in the game.

One way to powerlevel stealth is to repeatedly backstab the greybeards since they don't go hostile.

Thanks for the tip although I prefer not to power level. I try to do things more naturally.

What are shrouded gloves? Sorry I'm a total stealther noob in skyrim.

Shrouded Gloves are part of the Dark Brotherhood Armour so if you join that faction (likely for an assassain) you will get them
Armsman helps Dagger Damage, Bladesman doesn't
Its easy enough to use 2 daggers most of the time and switch to sword and dagger if you mess up and have to fight one on one. Keeping a dagger in your offhand gives you the fastest dual-wielding attacks so its not a bad tactic anyway

edit: plus daggers are light so you can carry several and switch between which suits your current needs

<sub>Do not, do not, do not join the Dark Brotherhood until you have both backstabbing perks. You get one of the perks from the One Handed tree and another from the Sneak tree. Without them you constantly get caught or get a bounty and it takes the fun out of being the stealthy assassin. It takes some time to get those perks so you'll have to be at a relatively high level before actually becoming a paid assassin. But it's worth it.

In the meantime do the Companions, Mage's, and even Thieves Guild quests before joining the Dark Brotherhood; or just make sure you have both backstabbing perks. Otherwise you're just a super inefficient assasssin.

With both perks you kill the person silently and walk away from it without issues. Plus you get the cool animations.</sub>

A very nice pair of gloves you get when you join the Dark Brotherhood. Absolute must for a melee assassin

You definitely want Dual Savagery and possibly Fighting Stance and Savage Strike, all in effort to maximize your survival chances - best to one-shot them than just hurt and then get involved in a fight, no?
You need Sneak for Assassin's Blade perk. 15x dagger damage + double that from Shrouded Gloves = win. From the left branch, Silent Roll might be useful; it's a sort of sneaking sprint, it's fast enough for you to get behind your enemy before they ever have a chance to see you. It's up to you if it's worth three perks to get it.
Don't take Stealth any higher than the first tier. High Sneak is enough to make you invisible, especially when you're wearing Muffled boots and specialize in Illusion.

Don't touch Lockpicking! It's an entirely useless tree. Once you get the hang of the minigame, you won't need any perks, only a lot of lockpicks, and they're in abundance in Skyrim. If you really svck at the minigame, though, you might wanna go for the Master perk.

If you plan on using Archery as well, all you really need is Overdraw. Power Shot is nice - it staggers your enemies. Personally, I like Steady Hand, but you probably don't need it. Better to put the perks into a crafting skill

Wear Light Armor, of course, and perk Wind Walker.

...wha? I call shenanigans. I started a character who went straight to Dark Brotherhood before any other major questline and I had no issues with difficulty or bounties until one of the later "high profile" missions, which gave me a decent bounty but I'm not sure how easy that is to avoid. There's some trial and error involved in a few spots, but not to the extent that it's even frustrating.

Then again, I used to play a lot of Splinter Cell so maybe I'm in the minority.

erm.. although i agree with Bacillus, i dont think doing the Thieve's Guild first is a good idea as the Nightingale's gear are levelled gear and doing their quests pretty early means you'll get the lower-levelled ones.

Thanks for all the advice guys. I'm starting to get a pretty decent idea of how this char will shape up. Really gotta overplan with skyrim since there are no respec options and it takes so long to build a guy up.

Should I plan on taking the perk to allow you to improve magical gear since there will be nice armor options from dark brotherhood and thieves guild quests?

Yes, I leveled up smithing, so I could get my DB gear to Legendary. Well, make sure you go see the old lady, once you get Olava's token as a special quest reward. Then go find the ancient assassin's armor. I've been wearing that for 30 levels now. My assassin is lvl 55 now. I concentrated on sneak and archery with this build, and I pretty much don't even use any daggers or swords anymore. I have a couple of Daedric daggers on me, just in case though LOL

Bounty? Shmounty. If you've got whirlwind you can get away from pretty much anything. And you can do it without having your bounty go sky high. You don't have to kill anything other than your target. So your picture gets posted "Wanted Dead or Alive 1000 Septims" at worst. I've been running around in my Dragonscale with the DB boots. Nothing like hiding in plain sight. In towns where I'm a Thane and have a contract I'll usually do a shout at someone and pull the thane thing to get off the hook (but this doesn't erase the bounty), then do the hit. If I get caught during the hit, oh well, I pay the fine (40 septims) and all is good. Usually it doesn't get to be a problem until the higher level assassinations though.

I've been running with two Skyforge Swords (legendary) -- one flame, one normal. & shield. Backstab + 100 sneak + muffle works just fine. For more powerful targets use a paralyzing poison + mark of death shout. IMO the Skyforge Steel Swords are the best in the game when upgraded to legendary because they're lightweight.

I started them well before I had those perks. Sleeping individuals with no one around can't scream for help and cause a bounty and you can supplement with poison if you can't get enough damage to one shot them.

My preferred method was waiting until nightfall and then breaking into their house and killing them. In alot of cases NPC's don't go to bed until late, so I would normally wait till about 8 pm for them to leave their day jobs, then wait once more till about 12 am to make sure they started heading for bed, then usually waited one more hour to allow them time to go to sleep (if you let this happen naturally then you won't have to do all the waiting).

If it's the one where you cook a meal, I dont think you can avoid it, since the people start shouting about it.
Not too much spoiler in that, sorry if it is.

Easiest way to shed bounty: Go to jail. Break out. Your bounty is re-set to 100, which is enough to get the guards scratching their heads about you, but not enough to make them immediately start chasing you.