Actually, if you have ever bothered trying to use smithing to improve weapons and armor, skill does matter. There are like 6 different levels of improvement that you can reach by improving your smithing skill alone. I have no perks in smithing and 100 skill and with a blacksmith potion I can refine my armor and weapons to "legendary" quality, which just about doubles their usefullness.

Note that I agree with your point, I just think you picked a bad example. I would prefer to become as good as possible at everything, so I don't like perks that much. Not to mention that there are loads of pointless perks. That might just be me missing oblivion though.

Thats not how the perk works. It's 20% more weapon damage not 20% more skill.

But making gear isn't the #1 feature of smithing, its improving your items. You can find/buy all of the gear that you could smith once you reach a certain level anyway. If I had to choose one aspect of smithing I would choose item improvment over what items I could make. Once you find a full set of good armor it make smithing that armor a much less valuable feature. Like Malohta says the skill does make your item improvemnts much better and thats what matters.

Totally agreed.

Check my thread in my sig, I pretty much have an entire topic dedicated to why its a bad idea and how to fix

You're totally right! My mistake... that one level of perk in Armsman (plus 30 in skill) gives you the equivalent of 72 skill (unperked), not 36 -- Sorry about that!
-Loth

PS Maths is harder than I think it is...

Ding ding ding! Yep, the #1 fail will be "No Spell Creation". But that's 139 threads away!

All the huffing and puffing you have done in this thread and someone saying you may be acting like a buffoon sends you into a tail spin?

Especially when you consider that NO npc's use any perks at all.......

I found the game very hard to begin with but now I've reached level 30 it's just starting to get enjoyable as I'm learning the best perks for my character and how best to use them depending on any given situation. The skill system definitely has an impact.

Actually its 200 damage for Lvl 50, 150 damage for Lvl 100

Armsman does not increase your SKILL by a percentage, but the weapon damage.

LOL How about somebody else points out my epic math fail? Anybody?

-Loth

Sorry, didn't see the other post!

Ummmmm......physics major, couldn't help myself

Ha ha ha. You're wrong!



just kidding, it happens to everyone.

Perks are part of the skill. An easy way to show your character is proficient in a skill in by looking how many perks he's chosen in it. As for smithing, even if you don't take any perks in it you'll be able to boost all your gear quite a lot. I'd say it's too powerful even without perks.

I have to disagree.

It comes down to this, regardless of what you call things.. There are two systems that affect your effectiveness. One is essentially unlimited: i.e., you can max it for ALL skills. The other is very limited- you will only ever be able to use a small percentage of them.

In the current game, the unlimited one is skill points. You can max out all skills if you choose to do so. The limited one is perks. The most you an have is 81, yet there are a total of 263 perks available (manual count, so could be off a bit, but not by much). Even if you max all skills out, you will only ever be able to get less than a third of the available perks. If you don't purposefully level skills that you don't typically use in your play style, you'll end up with around 50 of them- less than 20%.

This is necessary for some semblance of balance. If it were the other way around, were the skill level gave you 90% of the power in a skill, you could build a character that could do EVERYTHING. Essentially, all characters would be the same, and the class would be best called "GOD".

If that's how you want to play, why not just bring up the console, and type "tgm"?

The way the system is now it is necessary to make people actually make choices about the skills they want to have. That makes for a MUCH more entertaining game.

I think it turns out pretty balanced. A level 50 character will have an average of 10 perks for 4 different skills, and another 10 for 2-4 other less-used skills. That is plenty to make an awesome warrior (of many different types- sword and board, two-handed, dual-wielding, whatever), an incredible thief or assassin, or a kick-ass mage. It's also enough to make a good hybrid, like a spellsword, battlemage, sneaky fighter, or Illusionist-thief. A hybrid will probably be a bit less powerful than a dedicated class, but that's as it should be. Besides, a hybrid will generally end up with more perks before having to level un-used skills.

That is Arena, French Ninja!!! Arena has no skills, just attributes and leveling up is based solely on your experience points. http://img201.imageshack.us/img201/3294/uvatha.jpg No skills, only attributes. Maybe this is a cycle and TESVI will be like Daggerfall, TESVII will be like Morrowind and TESVIII will be like Oblivion....

Hehehe... you're not gonna hurt my feelings, guys. I was very, very wrong, and I deserved to get called out for it. Maybe I will think before I post bad info next time... maybe.
-Loth

In most RPG's, there are things you simply can not do unless you are the right level and the right class; perks are the same way. So don't think of them as perks. Think of them as points you use to buy your character class a little bit at a time as your skills get better.

I have deleted all the posts in the little lover's quarrel that was going on here. If you don't like what each other is posting, then ignore it. If you can't do that, then Block the person.

wouldn't you end up being good in everything, and the perks would be just small bonuses you could do without?

You make some good points, but I don't believe it is balanced. A balance would be at about 50% of power from perks, and 50% power from skill level. We have about 80-90% power in perks, and 10-20% power in skill. I dislike how the majority of power is derived from perks. I want skill to play an equally important role, beyond just being a skill level requirement for perks with an insignificant bonus to power.

Interesting.

That's the one perk in the archery tree I didn't choose. It felt less like a perk and more like flat-out cheating. I never even zoom in. Over 100 hours of the game and after the first day or so of playing I've never used any kind of zooming except to locate enemies.

what if skills and perks were more tied together, so that you couldn't reach level 100 in a skill without picking most of the perks from the associated tree? if you wouldn't, the skill would simply stop from raising mindlessly.