Taking a single example, look at runes. A rune can be cast pre-combat, without any real cost assuming you allow for regen.
You don't necessarily need any perks to cast one, it's something anyone could use. 2-4 perks can improve them quite a bit - augmented fire/frost/shock+dual casting.

So I figured I'd try it on my high level character. I'd been turned off destruction from the forum's reactions to it, but runes had sounded interesting to me and I thought "why not?"

Turns out, it's a complete waste of time. Even using a poison of weakness to an element or magic, a single arrow does enough damage that wasting a bind + time on using runes just isn't worth it. I could do it just for "RP" reasons but it seems hollow.

Personally I feel like the range between full specialization and none is too wide in many cases. An archer with perks and 100 skill does more than 200% damage of a starting archer, add high end gear and enchants and it's even more. It would become pointless for that character to use a melee weapon to defend themself vs. a scaled enemy if one happens to close in, because a melee weapon does equally pathetic damage at low skill/perks as that rune does. It's almost completely pointless for them to use a destruction spell as well - even one with essentially no cost in time or resources.

Obviously, spending perks in a skill's tree and increasing that skill should improve it, but I think in many cases in Skyrim skills can be improved so much they end up simplifying gameplay. A low level archer would get a lot out of casting that rune, and would often be better off using a melee weapon in melee range. A high level archer is better off just shooting things exclusively, even at point blank range.

Specialize in the lower levels rather than try to change playstyle at level 50...?

I agree.

But that's a good thing, otherwise every character would be the same. You'd just cast whatever was best in any situation instead of sticking to your character's theme. Besides, there is nothing stopping you from leveling archery and destruction at the same time (ie. by placing runes before each battle).

I agree, the perk/skill/equipment bonuses in Skyrim seem to be pretty inflated compared to other games. Enchanting's a prime example, with 100 level enchanting you can smith a piece of gear with a +40% damage bonus. Times four pieces of gear. Using a game like Dragon Age 2 for comparison, one of the more common pieces of equipment you'd find would be a ring with a +3% damage enchantment. The most powerful enchantment in the game came from a +35% attack speed rune, of which there was only one, that couldn't be removed or reused once it had been placed in a weapon. This game is very fun and well balanced in the early stages, but the bonus values, which seem to have been chosen more for "wow" factor than balance, completely hurt the end game. Ironically, destruction seems to have the best end game balance out of all the combat disciplines, primarily due to its lack of smithing or enchanting bonuses, and the relatively small magnitude of its skill and perk bonuses (+50% versus about +135% for melee/archery).

There's no real point to diversify. Everything the devs give to us players, seems to be poorly thought out balance wise, and deliberately made to overpower us to ridiculously asinine levels. Enemies are so basic and pathetic, that many perks aren't even worth taking because they have no use.

Bladesman only works off of base damage of the weapon, which is a fraction of total damage at high levels. For example using a Legendary Daedric Sword with 100 One-handed and 5/5 Armsman you will deliver 72 damage per hit. However base damage for a Daedric Sword is only 14, so 3/3 Bladesman perk will have 20% chance to cause 7 additional damage.

The bleeding effect of Hack and Slash depends on weapon material and skill level and lasts six seconds. However even a Daedric weapon used with level 3 of Hack and Slash will cause only 18 bleeding damage. While multiple bleeding effects stack, by the time you apply several of them the enemy will most likely already be dead.

The armor-ignoring effect of Bone Breaker is almost completely irrelevant because most enemies are lightly armored. Dragons and most monsters have high health and 0 armor, and even heavy armored humanoid enemies have no armor skill, no armor perks and no armor upgrades, so an opponent clad full in Daedric Armor will have 49+18+18+23=108 armor rating, which gives them a negligible damage reduction.

I used runes loads within a certain level range, until I started getting wall spells. E.g. sneak, cast a rune, cast an atronach, guy runs towards the atronach, hits the rune. They have their place.

I guess the lesson is it pays to have an idea about every skill that you are going to perk-up.
It SHOULD be useless to start trying to specialise in destruction at level 50 when you haven't even used it yet.
So the strategy is still there, it just has to be pre-concieved. For instance I have specialised in one-handed, light armour, and a range of magic skills, and I find combat very fun and varied. I can get involved in the melee by boosting my armour rating using alteration, or I can cast summons and shoot projectiles, or place runes around for mobs to walk into.
I can see how using nothing but a bow until level 50, and then trying to use other skills, is probably going to not work, and rightly so. It shouldn't work.

I disagree, without specialization this game will be dumbed down completely, and I mean to Fable 3 level, if anything this game could use more strategy though.

Runes don't get much better though, and you'd level extremely slowly with just runes.

I'd like to have a character that specializes in just runes rather than the whole destruction tree, but it's not really an option since there are no high level runes.

There are some skills that can be "dabbled in" to enrich your gameplay(restoration), but it's rare. Too many skills are all or nothing - they become obsolete if you don't continue to increase them and fill out the perks, and this confines your playstyle into something very simplistic at high levels.

Your characters shouldn't all be the same at high level, certainly, but gaining levels shouldn't make playing that character progressively more boring. Some perks do make solid improvements - block in particular has some genuinely enjoyable perks that aren't just a scaling up of block's effectiveness. It also has +20%/+5%/5%/5%/5% effectiveness perk, so it's a solid option to sink only a single point there but you can specialize as well. 20:5 might be a bit extreme but what if they changed the weapon damage perks to 25%/20%/15%/10%/5%? That'd actually make it an interesting choice rather than a no brainer 5/5 perk for anyone planning to use the skill at all. I wish more skill trees were more like block's.

It just feels like instead of adding a lot of interesting high level options, perks are just making your chosen skills scale with your level. Illusion is probably the most obvious example of this since it's directly related to levels, but I feel this way about a number of skills.



I'm not at all against specialization, I just wish specialization increased and defined your strategy rather than just decreasing it.

No, even if I had leveled destruction and archery evenly, it'd be a waste. There are no high level runes, and archery would end up doing more damage for no magicka cost making it pretty pointless to use destruction for its generic damage spells - runes are the only real part of destruction that would synergize with archery. They'd be a great addition if archery did less at max, and runes did more at minimum(or I guess if you could improve runes more).

So, basically, Odd Hermit, you're arguing for spells and abilities to level with the character as it advances through the game.

I agree, with the caveat that early-game spells should remain slightly weaker than mid-game spells, and mid-game spells should remain slightly weaker than end-game spells, regardless of the character's level or how much he or she uses them.

Mods will fix this.

Not exactly. I just wish things got more interesting at high level instead of the opposite, and that'd be just one way to go about making that happen. Allowing use to specialize more specifically would help as well. If you're only using a skill for a specific purpose, a specific spell, etc. there should be better options for boosting that in particular. Currently the perk system is a lot of very generic bonuses.

I think part of the problem is the tree design, it's very limiting. They sort of prevent a wider collection of perks with things like bonuses to individual spells. I'd love to have some more specific perk options like:

• Damage and duration of cloak spells increased by 25%/20%/15%
  
• Runes do 30% less damage, but paralyze enemies for 3 seconds
  
• Ward spells cost 75% less magicka when your health is below 50% (wards also just need an overhaul but that's beside the point)
  
• Summons cast while armor spells are active gain 25% of your armor rating
  
• Your targeted healing spells can affect summons, but you receive 25% less healing from all sources
  
• You deal 20% more melee damage while cloak spells are active
  
• You gain 50% more magicka from equilibrium, but your magicka regenerates 50% slower
  
• Your armor spells last 500% longer but reduce your magicka by 25% of their cost while active

All of the above promote more strategic play and add synergies between skills, but are still improving skills and defining your character more. A spellsword might always enter battle with a fire cloak spells, as it'd never become obsolete considering it improves his one handed damage. A fighter might have very low magicka, but could still manage to use wards to good effect in dire situations. Etc. etc. Problem is, some would be pointless for some builds to take if they were too high in a tree, but overpowered if they were too low. A level requirement for perks independent of skills would've been better IMO, like in Fallout.

The perk system is fine, although it's not perfect. I'd rather have that then the previous system.

There are a few good (if obvious) synergies between skill trees - sneak perks and block perks that benefit melee, light armor providing a stamina regen bonus for more melee power attacks, restoration perks that boost stamina regeneration. The skill constellation structure though, while pretty awesome looking, imposes arbitrary limitations on perk prerequisites. I'd imagine that once we open things up in the Creation Kit, we'll find that perks are implemented in exactly the same way that they were in the Fallouts - pick a benefit, assign prerequisites. With the trees, prerequisites are limited to a single skill and a single previous perk. It would have been interesting though to see some perks that bridged different disciplines - like a destruction perk that also required some level of archery skill, allowing you to place wards anywhere within your line of sight. Or a melee perk that also required a certain level of destruction skill, that allowed you to apply elemental damage or other spell effects to your weapons. If there were still athletics and acrobatics skills they could have set up all sorts of interesting attack and evasion options.

I don't agree that it's "fine", I think the tree set up is bad. I wouldn't argue that it's not better than the previous system of just skills and attributes though.
Yep. Fallout's system was MUCH better, wish they'd have taken more from it. Prerequisites are logical, but the linear/branching system took it too far and is definitely too restrictive and resulted in a much more boring character building system and, as a result of that, more boring gameplay.

I would suggest intentionally spending time in melee with a sword if you want a melee fallback as an option to your archer........

BTW: Runes svck... they don't even get the damage bonus from the destro perks. Only the direct attacks do (Cloaks and Runes don't)

Level up with a wider spread of skills and you won't find yourself so pigeonholed at higher levels.

the jack of all trade actually work, because of enchant+alchemy+smithing which give you boosts accross the board
you are still weaker than a full specialist, but more versatile

but yes, it would take a bit more perks to make it fully enjoyable and fun

I guess it s their answer to requests for some sort of class system, and to make sense of the class classification (battlemage, spellsword, etc...)

Wider spread of skills doesn't result in more perks though - it's either water the build down and just be less effective, or specialize. I guess wider spread of skills eventually results in higher level and thus more perks, but until you reach those high levels anyway you're kind of gimping yourself.

It svcks that runes svck since they were one of the spells I was most excited about pre-release. Do they even get a damage bonus from dual casting? And is it considered a bug that they don't get the damage bonuses(meaning a chance of it being fixed)?

Your build is viable.

Just don't go the smith/alchemy/enchant route for EPIC DAMAGE and then kill anything in one shot, thus negating the point of runes.

You do NOT need to play at master difficulty thus gimping the damage of runes and make smith/alchemy/enchanted bows SEEM like the only way to go.

There are mods that allow multiple runes with different effects. For example, a weakess to poison rune than you follow up with poisoned arrow, or a paralyze rune to cover your butt and let you put some distance between you and an angry giant.

I play on expert, but I think unless you went down to apprentice or novice level, runes would still svck. And on those difficulties, pretty much everything would be so easy anyway it'd still feel pointless going out of your way just to use an extra spell when it's completely unnecessary. There just has to be a good reason to use it other than just for the sake of seeing the spell effect for it to do anything for me.

just a question - are you on pc? If so, there are some great mods out there that make the magick much more viable and fun - also make runes fairly useful.

I'm on PC, but I have a tendency to avoid gameplay altering mods. For some odd reason I feel as though it's a form of cheating not using what the devs intended, despite how absolutely full of exploits and gamebreaking balance issues vanilla is. I don't why, I'm just weird like that, not a logical thing.

I feel the same way, I like being faced with an "official" challenge. At least until I've played through the game enough times that I've proven myself, then I go hog wild with gameplay mods, most of which end up increasing the difficulty anyway. I'd say melee and archery need their difficulty increased, magic is about right but needs to be rebalanced to give destruction more tactical choices.

thats fair enough - I have the same ethos, but less willpower : P
Though with mods that only add little things like better scaled spells, I tend to forget I am even using any mods after a couple of hours playing, and everything is a lot more fun. My primary character is a battlemage though, and I felt destruction wasn't as useful as it should be.