Just curious about this perk. I'm wondering how effective it is when all 3 perks are placed into it. If anyone who has taken this perk or has done testing with it could let me know their experiences that would be great. Thanks!

I have all three ranks in it and it does seem to help against heavily armored foes and I'm starting to encounter more of those. I've heard a number of people say it's less useful and the equivalent axe and blade abilities but armor penetration is certainly appropriate for these weapons and it takes most major NPCs down a few notches.

Be forewarned, though, that apparently dragons have no armor rating whatsoever, and get by with huge health totals, so this perk will have no effect on dragons.

Yeah I figured it would have no effect on foes with no physical armor. But Im just wondering if it also is like the other two respective weapon perks. Whereas say for the axes I think the bleed damage is based on the base weapon damage so it's of very little use later in the game.

The number of enemies you will face throughout the game that have an armor rating above zero are not very high, unless you go out of your way to fight as many bandit chiefs as you can. For well over 90% of the game, the bonebreaker perks will not do a damn thing at all for you, because hardly anything has armor (for example, Dragons AR = 0). Even the mighty Chaurus Reaper who is basically an underground dragon has a total armor of 100 (12% reduction) -- so if you get the three perks, then you will beat past 75% of that 12%... basically, jack squat bonus damage that makes you swing one less time (or thereabouts, depending on your damage rating) to kill it.

HOWEVER

When you DO find somebody that has armor, and also has enough skill with that armor to matter (there are very very few of these -- did I mention that? ) THEN the perks will help you out a little. Honestly, you might be better off taking perks in speech instead of getting any weapon specialization perks at all. When you find yourself thinking "Gee, it would be nice to get one of these perks for the weapon I love to use.." then just stop yourself and ask if it wouldn't hurt to get better prices for your loot instead.

-Loth

That's a point, but unless I were playing a fairly dedicated thief-type, I'd never spend a perk in speechcraft, to be honest. Money is so abundant in this game that it's ridiculous; you never really need to buy much except a house, to be honest, and the money comes fairly easily.

But of course you could always use those perk points for other skills' perks.

Very good insight Loth. Something to definitely think about.

Haha, my comment about speechcraft was kind of a joke that I forgot to smiley... next time I'll say "get perks in Lockpicking instead -- it's WAAAYYY better than bonebreaker."

-Loth

Oh. LOL.

Yeah, speech would be fairly useless, but lockpicking is utterly useless.

Doesn't really matter how situational bone breaker is, the other weapon perks are worse.

The bleeding axes effect is pathetic at higher levels and the critical hit from swords doesn't scale either and is just as meaningless compared to your final smithed weapon damage.

For the few enemies that bone breaker does apply to, it scales well. 75% reduction in armor is massive.

Agreed that it is not 100% worthless, and CAN be effective in a few situations... but 3 perks, man? Just to save a couple of swings? Yikes!

We did the math over in the Character Design Freedom threads... in order for bonebreaker to beat Axe perks, your enemy needs to have well over a 200 AR.

-Loth

I've got two out of the three axe perks. Never did the math to see how worth it they were, though. Not even sure how I'd go about doing that, since I don't know anywhere that specifiies how much damage is done by bleeding.

Investing in Bone Breaker now, at this stage, is merely symbolic. Perks invested are effectively wasted and matter only for RP purposes. Doing nothing against most enemies and a lot against very, very few enemies, is of course better than the other weapon perks, which simply do nothing against anyone. Even so, this simply makes Bone Breaker better than some completely useless perks, which doesn't really say a whole lot.

However, once the CK is out then there's probably going to be a mod or two that rectifies the issue with enemies having very little armor and a ton of health to make up for it. If you're on a console then don't get your hopes up.

Do you happen to have a link to that post? I'd like to see the math involved.

Whether it's worth 3 perks is something entirely different. Definitively save it for later for when you have enough perks. The damage increase isn't good for any of the 3 perks, but for a min-max build planning lvl 81 that's irrelevant.

The way I see it, an increase vs weak enemies is just as useless since you don't need any help against them. High armored enemies therefore are more effective to counter. Not to mention that certain mods might introduce more armored mobs which would instantly place bone breaker on top of the food chain. But in future mods they should probably also make the critical hits and bleeding weapon % based to compensate.

You can test it ingame by setting yourself up against an opponent, saving, and then taking notes before and after consoling in various perks to see their effectiveness. You can observe all enemy actorvalues by using the console, and this is how we knew that hardly nobody had armor and skill, and how we could see how much health damage the perks were doing by "getavinfo health". Back then, nobody even knew if bleed effects stacked until Domilasa ran the tests in her game and confirmed it.

-Loth

Ahahaha... man. We're on thread 9 now... digging up those posts would require wading through hundreds of responses. That's why we condensed the tested info we had into a Guide that we post at the beginning of each new thread. IIRC, I think it might have been in thread 6 or 7 when we discovered that the weapon spec perks are kinda lame. Please don't make me do this... It's bad enough that I took over for Cheshyr as the lead "thread monkey" over there.

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1333470-complete-character-design-freedom-damage-resist-caps-and-ridiculous-damage-thread-9/

Please tell me that a link to the latest one we have going is good enough for you. There are links at the top of the threads that back-link to the earlier ones we've had, so you can visit #9 and find out where the other ones are with one click.

-Loth

PS Agreed that mods could change the landscape, as far as these kinds of perks go. I am planning on making one myself that would alter armor values and skills of NPCs to make Bonebreaker more relevant, and perhaps even necessary at high levels and master difficulty. It may be tough to mod the other weapon spec perks, though... hopefully the CK will have potent enough functionality to let me get into the guts of the damage calculations and let the bleed and crit perks scale with skill/enchants/smithing.

As an aside, how extensive is modding in general? The last game where I had any contact with using mods was Starfleet Command and Starfleet Command II which were almost a decade ago, and if I remember right they were no more than adding new ship models to the game. Well, actually, I also downloaded a whole mess of new plane models for Flight Simulator and Combat Flight Simulator, but it sounds like you're able to do far more with TES mods than just adding new models and textures.

How deep into the algorithms can you go to alter things?

Nobody knows exactly what the CK will be capable of yet, but there are literally thousands of mods out for Skyrim already... I'm running like 20 of them right now, and many of them are retexts/models, because that's what you can easily do right now. I am also running some bugfix mods that repair the weapon smithing list errors (like the Skyforge dagger, for one) and prevent summoned atronachs from being absorbed by player spell absorption. There's a mod I love called Balanced Magic that adds armor penalties to spellcasting and tweaks the Alteration/Destruction spell schools to make more sense. There's a program called Skyedit that lets modders take a hack at the game files without the CK, but I'm sure this tool will be left in the dust when Bethesda's official modding suite hits the internet.

-Loth

i seriously doubt there will be any serious mod, which will give mobs armor, w/o nerfing bonebreaker in some way. (667/4)*.12=20% DR. So maces with bonebreaker could do up to 4 times as much damage as other weapons. Or to put it the other way around. Everything but maces will start to do up to 4 times less damage suddenly.

Yeah... if I was to successfully mod the creatures/NPCs armor ratings, it would only be fair to make sure the other weapon perks actually do something, too. I'd think that scaling bonuses would be appropriate, but who knows if that's even going to be possible yet?

-Loth

It should be something like the following IMO:

• Swords: Critical hits are based on full weapon damage (thus scaling). Example: a 100 damage sword deals 100 extra critical damage 20% of the time.
  
• Axes: +20% of weapon damage bleeds the target over 6 seconds. (stacks) Example: a 100 damage axe adds 20 extra damage over 6 seconds each hit.

This means the effective added damage is basically the same for axes and swords. One adds it quick but less predictable, the other one slowly. One could argue the poison damage should be higher because it's slower but you can make the poison not be effected by armor for a small increased effect as well.

• Maces: This one is tricky to balance with the other two. What you want to recreate is that it also adds approximately 20% extra weapon damage on average, but only vs certain monster types like: 35/30% and 5/10% vs most, or something like that.I think a mod should be able to easily add a base small armor value to each NPC (to represent the 5% reduction) and more added armor for certain NPC/creature "types".