It states in the manual and one of the loading screens that you get xp for improving stuff.

i think we have to face facts that many 13-15 year old play this game

I don't think it's really a matter of age...It's more an attitude.

One of the first games that really brought the talent tree / perk system into the fold on a massive scale to a wide audience was World of Warcraft. I take it you never played WOW? Cause even after 6++ years of development and countless talent tree revamps (in a MMO developers have far more flexibility to change things), there are still many useless skills and talent trees. What you notice in Skyrim is no different.

Lets see you get Smithing to 100 'legitimately' by crafting/improving only what you intend to use. The sad truth is the only way to get Smithing higher than the 30s is by grinding it.

You make yourself a full set of gear, a bow, two one handers, a shield and a two hander and you will go up 2 levels at the most. The Smithing EXP gained for improving items is extremely minor.

That has no correlation to intelligent / balanced game design. Saying "Its a game " does not excuse or justify bad game mechanics; (certainly not commercial ones). RPGs tend to demand a lot, and can leave players disenchanted with them if it becomes apparent that the core design of the mechanics are flawed (or easily exploitable). Player respect for the title can take a serious hit.
Sometimes, a game has enough good qualities to compensate, and flaws are tolerable for sake of fun gameplay, but even so... Games are not inherantly arbitrary and self justifying of any bad design choices for just simply being that 'its just a game'.

*Of course it could be a 'good game', or just a 'bad game'; (or a mediocre one).

I think I'm going to have to throw in my 50 cent in here now.

Many perks that ppl think that are useless or uneccessary is ultimately down to opinion. There was a thread/discussion not too long ago about how pathetic and useless the Lockpicking perk tree was especially the Treasure Hunter perk.

I went against this common complaint and chose the Treasure Hunter perk (when I could get it) as my character build does not have Enchanting as one of his skills.... and guess what, the Treasure Hunter perk is awesome, I find alot more special items that I use for myself and my followers!

True, I could have careered down the enchanting tree and developed my own special items, BUT my character IS NOT an Enchanter.

It goes to show that different perks suit different ppl, whether you think they are useless or not.

The game is not real life of course only based on such things in real life but it doesn't stop people using real life situations to further their argument.

Bethesda does not seem comfortable with the use of abstraction... They usually lean heavily toward simulation where they can in their games.

Often someone points to spells, and magic armor; dragons and such as not being real ~but one has to look at them in context (which is not our context ~RL). In the game those things are real. In the game it's acceptable that a dragon can breath fire... it is not acceptable that a dragon can inflate themselves like a balloon by breathing air into their thumb.

You're contradicting yourself. If looking at the game's context, there is no way to tell that it is a simulation, as everything (within the context of the game) is real. Men and mer does not excrete anything, and you can drink a potion without actually drinking at all

This is an excellent example of why many of us are frustrated with Skyrim. "I want to play as a *insert playstyle here* but I can't because I eventually hit a wall." The game designers should have designed a way around this, and can do so with a game update. It would be major (very game impacting) but it would really be helpful to those of us who want to play as we like.


"Man up"?? Are you kidding?? By all means, please let's make this about my manhood. Then next we can talk dirty about someone's mother/sister and about whose dad can beat up the other's.

Newsflash: this is a GAME. We are here to discuss the mechanics of the game and share our experiences and opinions. These opinions, BTW, commonly point to frustrations about level design and skill-tree issues. It's not just me who thinks things could have been done better.


Very well said, sirs.

Creating weapons and armor from smithing to sell IS a legitimate way to level the skill. Thats what the smiths in the game do for money in the game economy. If I find enough skins to craft 30 leather armor pieces and then sell them, that is a perfectly normal way to play.

You are responsible for your own game experience. Who cares what little kids do... i don't.

It is a legitimate way to level the skill, the problem is to find the difference between crafting different weapons and armors that you don't actually need to increase smithing against crafting hundreds of iron daggers that you don't ever need to increase smithing

Which is none, save for the RP value, but then again you can RP as an iron dagger supplier for the petty thieves...


There is absolutely no way to increase smithing without doing things that you don't need. Like I said, crafting only things that you need and improving them can only take you so far. To go even farther, you have to GRIND, by crafting and upgrading things that you absolutely don't need

You taken my answer out of context... bad Gizmo

Edit: it's easier to exploit magic than smithing

What's weird is how my combat skills level slower the higher they go but smithing leveled the same rate all the way up to 100%

Even in heavy combat it's rare for my sword or armor skill to increase.

I'm regretting a few poorly-spent perks from early in the game. Wish we could reassign them.

Fallout 3 was similar in that there were some perks that everyone would find useful all the time but some perks were so specialized as to be useless. Robot hacking? Child at heart? The bang for the buck simply was not there.

There's a difference between a useles perk and a different style useful perk. I have no use for stealth with a warrior character and a stealth character has no use for heavy armor. No reason to take both perks, that's sensible. But pretty much all speech is useless. The funny thing is there appears to be no check for any speech. If I intimidate or pervade, it always works.

I love the fact that Skyrim allows you to be what you want to be; if you want to be a blacksmith class and grind out iron daggers you can do that, while things can't be equal or balanced i.e. fully enchanting gear and smithing will make the game much easier you can do without those skills. The Perk System is fine the only thing I wish they would change is fortify spell enchantments should increase duration or effect and alchemy potions should reduce costs. I you do that the game is much easier for mages.

The entire premise of your argument is that people have no self-control and Bethesda has to put constraints in the game so that it is enjoyable for everyone. The counter argument to this is that the game is marketed to be what you want to be so Bethesda should give us a litany of options and let us choose what we do in our game.

That sort of sounds like the difference between fascism and libertarianism.

There are two major flaws with the character development system, they go hand in hand:

1. the gutting attributes and use perks as poor-man substitutes for things a well developed attributes system can do better

2. linking perk trees to skills instead of to attributes

This has been pointed out multiple times over the past year so I am not going to bother detailing the toilet bowl of fail that resulted from the 2 issues above except to say.... .....


minor edit above

This is true of all the crafting skills. You dont need to level alchemy, smithing or enchanting there are vendors for those items. You dont need lots of different potions, armors or enchantments to play the game and do well. Im playing on master with a thief and have only 2 perks in smithing for arcane smith skill and no other crafting skills at all. I am having no real troubles in playing the game successfully without needing uber gear, massive numbers of "funky" potions or even combat enchantments. All I have is items Ive been given or found, I have the nightingale full set a ring that gives me +20% archery and a talos amulet. I dont need any uber gear/potions/enchants at all, as the game doesnt require you to.

Its entirely optinal, and frankly however someone choses to level the skill is no skin off my nose. It doesnt affect my game in the slightest so I have no concerns about it.


It doesnt stay the same. I have leveled smithing perked and unperked on several characters. The amount of skill gained per items changes as you level up higher and higher. That is with a skill of ten in smithing 2 daggers might be required for a skill increase but at eighty skill it may require 15 daggers to increase the skill.

i feel they went the cheap and boring route with perks. put some skills in perks that shouldnt of been (alchemy, smithing, enchanting, etc). by combining certain past secondary skills with primary skills but still have the game world scale to mostly primary skills means you can make a very weak char if you try and roleplay.

but aside from all that, the thing that bugs me most is them making skills worthless and perks allmighty and redundant.

why do i have to spend perks to make my onehanded more powerful? why cannot my skill govern that? id rather have perks mean something besides affecting my hidden char sheet.

examples of good perks, shield charge, sneak roll, archery zoom, twohander sideway bash that hit enemeies in front

these are things that alter the system your operating within. it fleshes it out to something interesting.

your strength in something should be determined by skill level, your options should be determined by perks.

i have faith that modders will overhaul the perk system handily

The bad about skyrim perks:

when I get a useless perk in oblivion its free so I simply don't use it, in skyrim a useless perk is a waste of a resource and sometimes its unavoidable because a useless perk maybe be in the way of a great perk that you want.

Perks lock you in a certain direction usually comabt oriented and It makes you ignore others that you may find fun or interesting. By playing more than one character you can get access to a better variety of perks but even then I find myself wanting to get a lot of the same perks because of how important they are to combat. So like the OP mentioned perks for skills like speechcraft may not see a lot of play

Those are essentially specialisation perks, thats why they increase the damage output. Almost all RPG games feature some way for a character to specialise in a given weapon with the reward higher damage output with that weapon either by direct increases or by new skills.

When you start making games for everyone when the game is not meant to, that's how it ends up. If you've played Gothic 3, you'll know what I mean. Elder Scrolls has almost become an arcade game for the sake of a larger audience.

I played Gothic 1, Gothic 2 & expansion and Gothic 3. 1 and two were good, 3 was tripe. It was one of the worst games ever made and the character progression was crap. And it took years for it to become even playable such was the atrocious nature of the coding, that truely was unplayable not just hyperbole.

And how is a game "not meant to" anything? If your argument is that the game is not meant to cater to diffent styles of play then you are sadly mistaken. Eldar scolls has always been about playing the game as you see fit, and differing playstyles between roles.