These points have already been addressed on the last page and by others including myself. Yes, Skyrim has balance issues, but the VAST majority of these balancing issues come from player-crafting abilities. Other than that, fix the Destruction tree and maybe not factor in Speech, Lockpicking, and Pickpocketing into a characters level in regards to scaling difficulty & encounters.. And I'm pretty sure the vast majority of the games balance issues are fixed.

Level scaling is fine if everything non combat does not level you up. You don't max smithing then that 50 points in smithing you do have SEVERELY punishes you in actual combat because that is easily like 3-4 levels of non combat exp.

Yea its sounds like to me you made a blacksmith and a merchant character instead of going out into the world and exploring and fighting like a warrior character would. I have over 90 hours played in this game i have a 41 dual weilding light armor thieves guild master. A 27 sword and board companion harbinger and a level 11 destruction mage in this game. I have 4 85's on illidan horde with over a 2400 pvp rating. So i know a fair bit about the two games your talking about. While i think that level requirments would be nice for higher tier gear through smithing. Zone level requirments would break this game for me. I have played and own morrowind oblivion and now skyrim. I haven't played there earlier games as i am 23 and started gaming around the time of morrowind release. If you want an MMO where you are restricted as to where you can go and rely on grinding boring zones to get to the "Fun stuff" Like endgame content i suggest you go back to wow. But if you want a game where at level 1 you can hoof it to winterhold and start the story to become the mages colllege arch-mage, travel on foot to riften to start working for the theives guild or go dungeon crawling from jump street you're in the right game your just not playing it right. If you want a warrior go kill [censored]. If you want a blacksmith go spam daggers.

Ohh and another thing if you want a game like wow there is one, its called World of Warcraft. But i'd rather not have everygame i play be like the game i just got done playing.

You can't really consider Smithing to be a non-combat skill though.. It's direct function is to craft and improve better gear for your character.. The stable of melee, archery, and apperently even armor for Mage's in this game.

This obviously only applies to people who are playing those types of characters and actually place perks into the tree.. But if your just exploiting the leveling system to grab a few quick perks and not place them in the Smithing tree... Well then that's your own doing.

EDIT: IMO everyone should be able to craft every type of gear once a certain prerequisite skill level is reached, perks should simply allow you to improve those items beyond the norm in the first place.

To the OP:

If your character is level 15 with 0 combat/magic skills and 100 in smithing then Congratulations!! You've made a Master Blacksmith that has no combat experience. Ofcourse he'd get murdered by bandits because his lot in life is forging armour and selling it. Seems perfectly logical to me.

But then how does somebody who doesn't primarily use combat skills level up? I'm sure there are people like that out there, though they may be few, or may not be. (And yes, "level combat skills" is an obvious answer, but not the kind of answer I'm looking for in case you were going to go down that route, as it's very possible for some people to favor the non-combat skills more than combat skills and rarely use combat, or use means that reduce the amount of combat that they do.)

My brother is playing the game aswell and he is 100 smithing using ebony armor and level 46 having a much easier time with the game then me. Smithing dosent break this games balance. I should also mention we are both playing on master because we felt that after level 25 things seemed to die in 2 hits on expert. And as far as my mage goes im having a blast literally. Use the difficulty slider, its there for a reason.

Just wanted to say I don't like this post. Wish I could give it a thumbs down

This. I always played a warrior type in every game, and then I read all these complaint forums about level scaling and mages svcking, etc. and decided to try one for myself. Almost level 50 now, and haven't looked back. It's about a million times more fun, and if you think they're gimped, you're clearly just not mage material.

SPOILER!!!! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6uVksblx-w Here is a link of a youtube video that proves mages are viable in high level play aswell. It spoils Boethiah's Calling a deadric quest.

... You guys playing on master or what?

Because my game on adept mod while in the 10s to 20s wasn't very hard even though my speech and smith skills are higher than my combat skills. Isn't the whole point of trade skills to make you better equipped than the other guy? You don't hoard the money made with your trade skills and then get owned in your leather armour. You use it to make good equipment and beat down those mofos.

For wizards who dabble with smithing, you might find enchanting and alchemy to be more important trade skills than smithing. Zero cost spells should be your primary goal, everything else can come after.

The thing is is that they tried to make a game that had as little limitations as possible. Todd said it himself in an interview, that you could create and play any character you wanted and not screw yourself out of being able to play the game. Too bad this was a lie. How your character levels is fine. The skills and perks are fine. The scaled leveling is not and the generated quests don't seem to really take into account what your character is capable of as was claimed by the dev's.

Take this map for example. It's basically divided up into territories. Each territory should have a slight variation in difficulty between them. The primary change in difficulty should come from going farther and farther from civilization. It's safest to stick to the roads when traveling to or from places. World mobs are lowest levels near major cities. You may find some slightly tougher mobs near smaller towns. Roads will have weaker mobs closer to them than away from them but at the same time the mobs found near the road away from any town/city will be tougher than those found closer to towns. The same goes for dungeons, mines, etc. If their entrance is close to a town, then the mobs inside will match in toughness to those found outside. The farther from civilization, the tougher they get. That's only if you wander into these caves on your own. If you are sent there for a quest, the cave that might have had bandits if you simply explored it, might now have vampires that you were tasked to slay. Thus if you are level 17, and the entrance is not far from town just down a short path from the road, the lvl 5 bandits may then be replaced with lvl 15 vampires. While world mobs around the entrance are lvl 5ish.

With that being said, the particular task assigned to your character should reflect what it is your character is capable of to a degree. You may be given a task to kill some bandits that are currently just beyond your characters ability and so you'll have to do something else, gain a few levels then give it a go. In contrast, you may be given a task to kill bandits that you can one hit kill. Loot and reward should be scaled to the level of the mobs and not you. Also, the quest givers should be able to 'read' you a little bit. If you look light on your feet, have light armor, and use a subtle weapon (dagger) then it's reasonable that the NPC will read your character as stealthy (in reality the game knows you have a high sneak skill) and so the npc will probably require you to steal something from a bandit hide out. So if you have a high heavy armor, block and 1h skill, the same npc will get you to kill the bandit leader instead.



The bottom line is that the difficulty of the task should be determined by you character's prowess at the particular skill(s) required to complete that task. So take a level 15 character with a high sneak, lockpick and pick pocket skill but very little in any combat skills.

A quest giver gives you the task of stealing something of value. It involves sneaking past lvl 25 mobs because your sneak is high enough to and breaking into a chest with a master lock. You are rewarded loot scaled to the order of 25 because the level of those skills puts you on par with lvl 25ish NPC's/Mobs. The same NPC then tasks you with taking out a group of bandits that recently mugged him/her while you were away. These bandits may be only lvl 5 because at your current prowess for combat, that is all you can handle providing just the right amount of challenge. The reward is then scaled to lvl 5.

At least then the option is there that if you wish to work on a new group of skills (say starting to work on combat ones after gaining 20 levels with non combat ones) you will actually be able to face off against mobs that won't one shot you.

Also, major quests should have multiple paths to take. Using words instead of a blade to resolve an issue for example. There can then be multiple possible outcomes to the major quests depending on how you handled it.

I find the leveling system fine, and why should the game limit you in terms of crafting, what if you want your character to be a blacksmith, why should you be forced to run put and level up your other skills so you can craft more stuff.

I somewhat agree with the whole scaling enemies thing would be nice to have more areas with static level mobs.

I've not seen so far where a certain build is completely godlike unless you count the smithing, enchanting alchemy trick, I mean my stealth character has trouble fighting enemies head on, how it should be and my warrior can't sneak to save his life, It's all about how you play the game.

Leveling something is probably the one thing that annoys me I mean in no logical world should repeated making of an iron dagger suddenly give you some inane understanding of Elven armor and how to improve it.

Jesus people, just read the text before you bash the op. He has some good points.

The level scaling broke my second character. A thief that I roleplay.
The only skills I have leveled on him is pick pocket, lockpicking and sneaking.
So he has no combat skills. When I get into a fight I'm pretty much screwed from the get go because of level scaling.
He is level 21 now. Anyway, this character is broken and that's a shame because I really enjoy playing as a thief. But without combat I can't progress, and it feels all too late to change that now.

On my first character I had no problem at all. Barbarian with a two-hander, and as you might guess his skills was only combat.

There's also a reason why I don't play those MMOs. Its boring.

Steal stuff as a thief would. Get training in combat skills from a trainer with the stolen loot. Problem solved.

If you don't know what you are doing -> play on novice.

I love your example of WoW with Level 1 players going to a high level dungeon and saying they die left and right.

Maybe they will die GETTING to the dungeon; but unless they've changed how you enter instances since I've played (which, granted, has been a long time), you had to be within 5 levels of the dungeon to enter it.

But how would that help? I'm still behind the world in level. I would never be able to catch up and be viable in combat. Bandits are starting to use heavy armour now...
The thing is I don't expect my thief to be able to kill stuff like my barbarian, but when a skeever is a problem something is messed up.

And even if I survive a fight, I have to use 5-10 health potions. Expensive, and potions are hard come by. Especially when I have already looted all the shops and homes that has potions.

You play non combat character ... play on non combat difficulty.

Funny guy you..

For me it makes sense that thief (not assasin) don't know how to fight. In a world where he is the hero, his enemies must be a bit weakish.

I will agree that the game is severely unbalanced, so hopefully this will shed light on the in's and out's of it... Ahem.

In the game, enemy placement is defined by your character's main level, not your combat level. For example, I started
a brand new game and maxed out smithing to see what it would be like. First dungeon was CRAWLING with Restless Draugrs
and I ran into a Sabercat right outside (which is definitely not supposed to be there this early). The enemies don't scale in level,
there are just DIFFERENT enemies placed in "spawn points" if you meet certain level marks- like finding an ice troll in Bleak Falls Barrow
when normally it's just a female draugr near the waterfall.

There are also issues with scaling in crafts- the biggest culprit being smithing. I literally maxed my smithing skill in 2 hours in the
beginning of the game by crafting iron daggers. Crafting heavier, more difficult equipment was barely rewarding- and regardless of my
smithing level, iron was so plentiful and so easy to use I just exploited the entire system and was able to get endgame gear.
What's ironic, is that many of the rare ores in the game are found in locations that are too dangerous or far off the main story path,
and thus if you level naturally you'll never be able to make anything better than what you find in dungeons. Interesting, eh?

If anything, I would say that it's too easy to get "too powerful". I'm sure many of the players that are having problems just don't know
how to exploit the game yet and are trying to play the game in its most natural setting, but even then it's possible to be completely
overpowered compared to your foes.

There is a video of a thief with no combat skill (level 25 on master diff) who could one-shot mammoths/giants/deadra overlords, and even
one of the final bosses- all because he knew how to exploit the game in its own design. It wasn't done through the use of glitches or
mods, it's just that the game is broken in a lot of ways- you just have to figure out where to exploit it from.

That said, I hope the point I made is clear enough: the game is broken, it's just simply broken.
I wouldn't say it's too hard, if anything, it's too easy- maybe a little tedious at times. I don't think MMO design choices are the solution
for what is a massively single player game, but I do understand that they are both (essentially) RPGs and function in similar ways.

Yeah, I agree. But the problem is that this game revolves around combat. Every quests involves combat, and dungeon crawling. And good luck killing a dragon when your main skill is pick pocket. Thanks to the level scaling of the game it makes my character totally useless. If only the game took into consideration what skills you have leveled up I would have no problems with it. But it does not.

I agree that pickpocketing and speech shouldn't contribute to leveling up. Does not make sense.