I see the perk system as follows:

Pros:
It's nice to specialize your character.
Some of the perks add new cool things that weren't possible in Oblivion.

Cons:
Having a tree requirement to reach the top perks. I don't want to waste perk points on "novice destruction spells cost 1/2 magicka" because I'm never going to cast those spells again once I learn the better ones, and if I do cast them, they aren't expensive in the first place so who cares? Another example is the lockpicking tree where top tier perks make previous choices useless and obsolete. They should be in a skill column but not a tree.

You don't start to feel special because just to survive you need a constant investment of low level perks like the base level perks in armor, one handed, shield, archery, alchemy, enchanting, etc. Those first perks that have 5 perk upgrades keep eating up my perk points so I never seem to get anywhere "special". Those base damage perks should not even be perks, but be auto upgrades as you level that skill. A little bonus for leveling the skill itself would be great, but no we have to waste a perk to get a 20% increase, where we should get a 1% increase each time we level that skill in the base damage/value.

You have to train skills you don't use to keep advancing to earn more perks. Why? Why not allow a skill to go beyond 100? Even if its just 1% damage adjustment and horrible grinding, I'd rather grind one handed to 120% than train two handed to keep leveling up to get more perks. This would allow one to get all the perks of a chosen skill without breaking character. It would make sense that ok yeah I'm dumb, but eventually I learned every single perk in one handed by grinding one handed to 150% because early on I wasted my perk points. Or just make perk points awarded per skill so you can only use them in the skill they were learned in.

Why not a perk to advance in health/magicka or stamina? Remember in fallout if you didn't see a perk you wanted you could just level up here and now, or take another point for special? For skyrim maybe I just want more magicka or health, they should allow a perk that grants you that choice.

Overall I think Perks are better than in Oblivion, but the design makes it kind of difficult to fully enjoy. I start characters with intent of making them a certain class and fully customized, but always end up wasting all my perk points on basic stat modifier perks at the base of the main tree of light armor, one handed, archery, alchemy etc and by level 30 I am just a stronger version of the level 1 character I had with ZERO new skills learned from perks practically. I don't feel special. Maybe this is my own fault but I feel like the game kind of forces you to do this. It's like you can't reach the good perks quick enough because they require a high skill, and then the enemies level up and require me to keep tossing points in armor/one handed/shield/alchemy etc just to stay competent. By the time I'm level 60 I'm still a jack of all trades and can't get enough perks to master even a couple of trees without resorting to training or using skills I'm not interested in.

So there is a cost on getting the top perks? In a RPG? Who'd have guessed? But trees in general? Yes please, they make perfect sense, and sometimes you have to sacrifice something (points) to get to what you want.

As for lockpicking, the only bad thing about it is that it is so easy for non thieves who spend no points in it to, well, open locks, and that picks are found pretty much everywhere. They're even being sold by regular merchants ffs, which doesn't make sense at all.

For a thief, especially in the early game, lockpicking (and speechcraft - another one of these so called "useless" perks) makes sense further up as you can get plenty of additional cash without having to risk fighting for it, and thus be able to buy the training you not always can get in the field.

madmole- you don't have to get all 5 points worth of that intial base talent of the tree. are you saying that later you must fill it out before getting certain top tier one's?

as for the tree itself-- can you get ALL of a tree filled out (like smithing) or can you only go one particular "route" up the tree. what about branches? can you get them and continue up?

i definitely don't understand the mechanics of it, yet.

It would still be nice for advancing your skill to actually do something. Right now, skill rank does affect your capabilities, but it is negligible when compared to what the perks can do. If the game were simply to provide those specific perks as handouts for increasing your skill while leaving the rest of the tree up to you, it would open up more options for character diversity because the player is no longer wasting perk points doing what skill rank should be doing in the first place.

To answer your other question, you can take any perks you want so long as you have the skill rank and perk prerequisites to take them. Choose wisely, though, you are limited to 80 perks per character (hard max. level is 81, and you start at level 1).

Im at lvel 81 and got 20 perk points left, so many perks all so useless when your skills are all at 100

This sort of devoted fan stuff is so silly it makes me just laugh. I mean with comments like this we can look forward to nothing ever being fixed or improved ever. Lockpicking, Pickpoketing, and speech are convenience skills. They should not raise the level (god awful scaling) of monsters in the world and should offer something meaningful for the point investment. The worst out of these is probably lock-picking like the OP said, previous perk points should not be rendered obsolete by the crowning perk. The only time I take points in these is for pure role-playing reasons, and it always eats at me knowing I would be fine without them.

If money was hard to come by, if stealing was not so easy even unperked, if locks could not be opened without perks, then maybe these skills would come in handy. As it is you can get so much money and gold, and NPCs are oblivious and let you steal from them without fail. Everything these skills are supposed to provide is completely uneeded and does no good in combat at all. And if you are dumb enough to level speech or lock picking or Pick pocketing from the get go, you will face a game full of magically higher leveled enemies. I did this once leveled speech to 90 so I could play my bard, I was getting destroyed by everything because enemies leveled up.

It is bad design and should be changed in the next version, if we just listened to fanbois the game would never evolve or get better.

So what exactly would you have instead of "increase power by n%" perks?

Power/Magicka cost of magic and melee/bow attacks be governed by the skills, and perks governing gimmicks and techniques that defined your character.

No you only need one perk out of 5 on that base to advance to the next perk, but with all 4 of my characters I typically end up spending most my perks on those base perks spread out on about 4-6 skills so by the time I have the skill level required to choose the higher level perks of a particular branch, it's kind of too late, I don't have enough perks because the enemies leveled with me so I constantly needed to choose base perks to keep up with them.

I could probably avoid that by not using my perks but then I would feel overpowered by some enemies or need more potions and stuff for survival.

Useless perks changed up to be worth something, and perks that are too good (steady aim and unbreakable, for example) nerfed a bit.

As madmole said, this would make skill rank more meaningful and it would also not put a price on your ability to keep up with the game's level scaling (never do that, it's terribly cheap to force the player to pay for the ability to remain on the same tier as his enemies when his enemies get it for free).

The whole system is badly balanced (balance is not something Bethesda is good at). Smithing, for instance, would do better being separated into an armor and weapons branch instead of light/heavy armor, for instance (though in reality that tree needs help big time).

And if you were really desperate, change perks to only be given every other level instead of every level (though that would probably be last resort).

No balance is something Bethesda outright refuses to do, hence their constant reliance on scaled enemies. Like everything is just crazy, way too much gold, way too easy to steal and exploit, scaled enemies and so forth. You basically get a graphically intense sandbox with swords and spells to play with. There is a lot of fun in that, but it really miss so much when their is like no attempt at balance. If they had just one to two guys who really tried to create a more balanced playing experience I think it would do wonders for the game. I know a big game like this has a lot of variables but that is why you keep game balance a focus from the get go, don't just try to fudge it all together as the last thing you do.

Have a plan, what areas should be hard, what items should be rare, what items should be unique and HARD to acquire. Bethesda has no plan, as far as a balance and programming the tedious stuff they seem to just don't do it.

A lot of the balance issues occur because they are trying to add non-combat skills to a combat-heavy design. That's one of the reasons why people complain about "useless" perks and skill trees. If they removed stuff like Speech/Lockpicking/Pickpocketing/Smithing they could easily balance the combat end of things. All they have to do is compare DPS and a few other numbers. The design fails because they provide non-combat skills but not enough non-combat content to make purchasing those skills worth the cost. The solution is to add non-combat alternatives to balance out the combat end of things so people feel like they're choosing alternatives instead of gimping themselves. Of course, they also have to make the perks worthwhile on top of that.

Cannot agree more. Right around level 25-30, it really hit me how pretty much half the perks I bought are useless, and how most of the perks I don't have I really didn't want to get. I invested 5 points in One-Handed combat, 7 points in shield, and thats it. I'm level 63 now playing on Master from the start, and I haven't felt like I've needed to invest a single perk point more in combat skills. I do way more than enough damage, and even in light armor I'm able to fight Ancient Dragons toe to toe beating them pretty much unscathed. All my other points went went into Magic, Stealth and the Crafting Skills...But just about all those perks have felt like a waste.

The sneaking perks have been absolutely useless, and I feel like an idiot for looking at Shadow Warrior early on and thinking "WOW THATS AWESOME". It's not, not even a little bit. The entire stealth tree is renderred obselete by two (maybe 3) simple things: Natural sneak skill and invisibility (muffle enchantment if you want to sneak wearing heavy armor). Most of the time Shadow Warrior doesn't even work right -- They'll just keep on attacking you no matter how hard you spam that crouch button.

Smithing...Wow what a dissapointment. The only perk there that gives you something you can't easily find is the Dragon Smithing perk, and for that you have to be 100 smith and invest perk points on all that crap before it. Smithing is especially bad because it's absolutely USELESS in all other regards. In Morrowind you used Armorer through the whole game since you had to constantly maintain your equipment...But in Skyrim, you craft a billion iron daggers, craft your suit of Dragon Armor, reinforce it and you're done. It'll take you about an hour and a half. It doesn't even feel like proper skill, and the only reason you'll want to invest perk points in it to begin with is the Dragon Armor...So for that ONE good perk, you have to invest in all that other junk...Not cool. Yeah, Arcane Blacksmith was useful too...But guess what? In order for you to make use of that skill, you have to be a decent enchanter...So in essence, that skill requires you to invest even MORE XP and perk points to be of use.

And the magic skills? Three perks. There are three perks that have actually made major contributions to my progress. Twin Souls, Quiet Casting and Extra Effect. Everything else has been complete novelty. Destruction spells, which are fully perked with extra damage, impact, and expert destruction are nowhere near as efficient as my dual enchanted melee weapons (my One-Handed skill only has 5 perks, mind you) and shield. I can already perma stun with my shield bash so impact is useless, and my weapons outdamage my spells by leagues. Illusion and alteration are more of a waste of time for me than anything, and the only useful perks are the ones at the very top -- which are NOT worth the investment. Silent spell is good, but I could do without it...And if you really want the Atronoch perk, you can just go for the Atronoch sign.

Ontop of all these perks feeling like a waste, some of them dont even work. I swear, I have not noticed Soul Siphon work a single time in my entire play through. As I mentioned before, Shadow Warrior rarely works for me. Quiet Casting does technically work, but enemies are STILL aware of your presence once you hit them with a spell and will start running towards your direction looking for you. The reinforcement bonuses you gain from Smithing isn't applied to a lot of unique pieces of equipment for god knows what reason, seeing how most unique equipment in this game is easily outclassed by generic fully enchanted/reinforced equipment...So it's not like that would make them grossly over-powered or anything.

So yeah...Once I got to around level 30 I just stopped caring about perks at all, and started throwing points into whatever suits my characters flavor. I invested so much in perks that were bland and barely contributed to my game experience, and in the end I felt like perks really didn't have much importance at all to my character growth. I mean come on, do you find any of the combat perks interesting at all really? They're all just static damage increases and instakill/paralysis procs.They had an oppertunity to give us some truly unique skill tree's here that rivals Diablo 2 and WoWs customization, but instead we get these arbitrary bonuses that are downright stingy at times.

"Useless" is an opinion. So is "useful."

I find the perks quite useful so long as I'm not power-leveling through the game and using Alchemy-Enchanting-Smithing to become a god.

There are some threads, I just can't wait for them to reach 200 posts so they get shut down. This is one of those threads.

The reason that they are gone is shiny graphics and voice acting.

I like the tree style much much better than Fallout's perks. Feels like actual tailoring of a character type rather than just picking from a list each level.

Some are stinkers, though, like the entire Speech and Pickpocketing trees. Also Alteration kinda is poop. But I like that you dont have to go all out in any one tree to be viable in that area. The lower down perks are pretty good,

-this- Agreed, fully.

One perk in particular that seemed needless to me is the archery perk that allows you to loot more arrows off bodies. You should already be able to get your arrows back. It feels cheap when I shoot a guy with 7 arrows and know I'm only getting 2 back because I lack a certain perk.

I sorta-kinda agree with OP.

Some perks can be useless, especially in lockpicking. Also, the perk that makes heavy armor weigh nothing and not slow you down almost destroys the purpose of light armor.

There is a lot of room for improvement, but I think Beth did well for their first time putting perks into their game.


Speaking of perks, I'm wondering what the last perk in Alchemy really does. It says it removes all negative affects as well as positive. If I understood that correctly then after creating a potion you would have a useless bottle of liquid that would do nothing. wtf

Excellent post. I think the main point is that you have to be able use your own imagination well enough to place certain limitations on your own character in order for that character to be what you want it to be. It's almost as if some people want Bethesda to have replaced their own imagination.

If one doesn't like a certai skill tree, don't use it. So fine, the lockpicking tree is rather useless to most but for a person who wants to invest their character with every single possible aspect of thievery and/or assassination, it can be fun to use a perk for lockpicking even if it isn't all that practical. And if you don't like the fact that you can get a perk that makes Heavy Armor weightless, don't use it.

PLAY the role.

no it says its removes all negitive effects from potions and all positive effects from POISONS

The perks in Skyrim aren't exactly tied to individual skills. They actually kind of replace them in the grand scheme of things. Sure, there's a skill requirement, but a lot of what you unlock with perks can render your skill levels moot.

I love how people are defending the system though. Bethesda could have made Alduin look like a giant piece of crap with wings shaped like hearts, and people would still go on and on about how Skyirm is amazing and Alduin is so badass and Skyrim is just so amazing, it looks so amazing, and there aren't any bugs! What bugs?! NO BUGS!! NO! GET OUT, HERETIC!

Ugh. Anyway, the entire point of the perk system was to avoid all the class elements that Todd Howard said railroaded you into assuming a certain role before you're actually a few minutes into the game. However, the perks turned out to be worse. You're still railroaded into assuming a certain role, only this time you can't just level up other skills as a solution. You choose a perk and you're stuck with that perk, forever and ever. You also need to choose certain perks before others are unlocked. Under the old system, the only confining aspect was the label you chose in the beginning of the game (yes, the so-called railroading was only because of some text that was really quite irrelevant). You could be a fierce warrior by leveling your melee skills, and still decide to be a potent mage later on in the game by leveling your mage skills. In Skyrim, you can't do that. If you spend most of your perk points in the warrior trees, you will not have enough to become even a decent mage. Even if you level your skills, they will not supplement your playstyle as much as the perks would have (because in Skyrim, perks > skill).

I don't understand how anyone could think that's a good system to have. It's extremely limiting, which is the opposite of what Todd Howard had in mind for Skyrim (at least, that's what he says). It's supposed to be about freedom, yet switching to a viable mage build mid-game after investing perk points in a warrior or thief build is almost completely impossible without using the console or mods.

Again, ugh.

Yes becuase genuinely liking a system makes people Bethesda [censored]?

thats literally one of the most stupid things ive read in awhile.

They don't just like the system. They absolutely refuse to acknowledge the glaring faults within it. You can go on and on about how you think it's great and amazing, but it really isn't.

Skyrim is supposed to be about freedom.
Is having to invest a certain amount of perk points into a specific tree before you're able to get the perk you really want freedom? No, not even in the vaguest sense of the word.
Is having to commit to a build you've been building for most of the game because you simply cannot accrue enough perk points to make another viable freedom? No, not even in the vaguest sense of the word.
Is having to live with the fact that the higher level perk you recently "learned" rendered the perks below it useless (read: fact) or a complete waste of time freedom? No, not even in the vaguest sense of the word.

Those are facts. The perk system is bad. It does not do what it was designed to do (if it was even designed to do what we were told it was designed to do), and that makes it a bad system. You can like it, sure, but you honestly cannot argue that we're better off with it than the system that has worked perfectly fine for the longest time. There were a few quirks, but Bethesda could have fixed them and polished it a bit more before throwing it out the window.

In Oblivion, I could spend most of the game as a warrior. A beastly warrior that is unrivaled in strength and.. beastness. Of course, I can do the same in Skyrim.

However, what I cannot do is decide that I want to instead be a mage that's just as beastly. In Oblivion, all I would have to do is level the skills associated with spell casting and I'd be set. Yeah, that does little more than turn you into a mediocre spell-slinger in Skyrim. The real power behind the archetypes, and hybrids of them, are the perks that support them. Skills don't do nearly as much as they used to, so I'd be forced to settle with my previous build or a new one that would never, ever, ever work as a viable, standalone build, and all because I don't have enough perks.

Again, that is a bad system.

Well. That's completely not how Smithing felt to me. I used it throughout the game - I crafted some gear to fill in slots that I didn't have good items for, I reinforced looted gear, I used Arcane to improve the various pieces of enchanted loot that I found, etc. And when I finally got the skill high enough to make Dragon armor (at character level 48), I decided it looked ugly and went back to my mix of Glass and Elven. Every perk I got in that skill, I used for a number of levels. Except for the top perk, I didn't find any of them "useless".

Not sure what else to say.