Please keep the discussion on thoughts to improve the gaming experience.


I'll admit I'm a bit of a power gamer coming from other more traditional RPGs and I feel the leveling system offered by Skyrim lacking. It feels this way for me for two reasons.

First because it doesn't offer a sense of progress: yes the toon in Skyrim does progress but so does enemies, the scaling system means I can neither overpower weaker foes nor take on stronger enemies I couldn't early on in the game (to some degree). I'm not here to debate if the scaling system is superior than the traditional RPG leveling system - there are just different styles - so to each their own.

Secondly the effort/reward ratio of many aspects of the game is poorly tuned. Ones that stand out the most are Smithing and Enchanting, which take very little effort but provide huge gear upgrade, potentially completely destroy the incentives to get into dungeons for gears. The opposite is those of Lockpicking and Pickpocket, their levels and perks hardly matter, provide little real reward yet take quite a bit of effort to level up.

Now my random thoughts about how to improve the perk system (some of them can already achieved by mods):
- On the map there should be "provinces" around each major city, the further a dungeon is away from that major city, the strong the mobs are. Player should choose where to venture to based on this as they level up. And the harder dungeon should provide significantly better rewards. This way the game still stay open, but control players progress.
- Two or three systems in place to throttle leveling progress:
1. Keeping max skill point at 100, players skill point should be limited by player level times two (e.g. if you are at level 18, any of your skill can't exceed 36)
2. A tier system for all skills should exist: 0-20 novice, 21-40 apprentice, 41-60 adept, 61-80 expert, 81-100 master, to reach next tier, player must find a trainer and pay significant amount of gold to reach next level. The higher the tier the more expensive. Player won't be able to gain more skill point if capped by its skill tier.
3. If we can, add certain quests as a requirement to unlock training of the next tier.
- The lockpicking/pickpocket rebalance will impact questing, but IMO it's a good thing.
1. Players shouldn't be able to unlock a lock that's beyond their lockpicking level. If it's a master level lock, you have to be a master of lockpicking to unlock it.
2. Pickpocket should be alot harder and certain NPCs should carry lucrative items as incentive for thieves.
- Smithing/Enchanting/Alchemy in my opinion are completely broken, some major thoughts need to be put into them. Perhaps worthy a thread in itself.

Now about Smithing/Enchanting/Alchemy

The problem with Smithing/Enchanting is that they provide an alternative for gear upgrade with a lot less effort compared to questing/dungeon crawling. They shouldn't be the main source of gear upgrade, instead, they should only serve as a methods to augment gears obtained from questings/dungeon crawling, preperably with quite a bit of cost in gold as a gold sink.

On top of that Smithing/Enchanting/Alchemy all provide gold income too easily, especially Alchemy.

Again some random thoughts:
- With the throttling mentioned above, those skills are still too good
- Fortify smithing/enchanting/alchemy should be completely taken out from potions and gears.
- The only way to gain experience should be crafting items from players' current and previous tier of the skill. (e.g. if you are adept blacksmith, only crafting items from apprentice and adept tier should grant experience)
- Smithing: no vendors should sell any ores/ignots, the only means to obtain them should through questing/mining
- Smithing: Gear improvement on weapon/armors should lose its effectiveness when attack(weapon) or getting hit(armor), for example after taken 1000 HP lose a Superior armor should be downgraded to Fine armor.
- Smithing could benefit from recipe system, instead of automatically being able to craft everything after getting the perk, players need to get the recipes first or learn crafting them by completing quests for various smith NPCs.
- Enchanting: for tier system to work enchanting formulas probably need to be broken down to one of the 5 tiers.
- Alchemy: crafted potions should sell for a lot less gold, especially those with significant negative effects

First thing (provinces) dont sound possible. Everything else doesnt seem like a good idea

My opinion, i have my own ideas for my own mod though. Should fix things

AFAIK this type of scaling and danger is already in the game and how dungeon "levels" and difficulty works by default. Areas around the major cities and lesser towns are safer than areas far out in the wilderness and especially at the higher elevations such as on mountain sides or at the peaks (dragon lairs).

The rest of what you wrote is probably possible with the CK and some scripting knowledge but it's also not something I'd care to use. To each their own, good luck with it if you choose to make something like this.

Yes the level scale does exist to some extent already, but they don't feel profound enough.

I don't particularly feel mobs are stronger the further away from the cities really.

I have a hard time taking people who use terms like "toon" and "mobs" seriously. This isn't WOW.

That said, I'll address your suggestions anyways:
Provinces -- The game already does this, to an extent, but behind the scenes. Certain areas are scaled higher than others, and will have tougher enemies and better loot. Some areas are set to scale to your level the first time you go there, and then remain at that level throughout the game. This creates the effect you're looking for if you just play the game naturally, as generally, you'll find stuff further away from cities at later levels anyways.

Second point: I could see a mod coming along that limits how high a skill can be for a certain level... but with the small number of skills in Skyrim I don't think it's really needed. I don't want to have to train Alteration on my smashing warrior character because all my combat skills are 'capped' for my level.

Tier system already exists, it's represented in the perk tree. You have to reach certain levels of skills before you can unlock the appropriate perks. Adding a requirement to be trained by some random NPC seems like adding busy work for no real benefit.

Quests for unlocking skills (or perks) -- This I like. I was quite pleased by the mage quests to get the master level spells, would love to see more things like this in the other trees. There's a hidden archery trainer already in the game with a little minigame that will get you several levels of Archery when you complete it... more things like this would be awesome.

Lockpicking changes: Yes and no. Personally, rather than capping anything for lockpicking directly, I'd like to see more alternate ways of unlocking stuff added for warriors and mages. Mages should get scaled unlock spells, warriors should be able to bash the lock (with some sort of penalty for failure, such as destroyed loot). Also bashing would guarantee to set off traps.

Pickpocket I can't comment on, since I haven't bothered with it. Though, from what I've seen... most NPCs do carry some small valuable objects that are worth lifting, so it seems to be a somewhat valuable skill if you want to play a pure thief and make your money that way.

Sometimes I just can't be bothered to use "Character" instead of "Toon", but since we are here to discuss how to improve the game, I consider this off topic.

I guess the reason behind "provinces" is to limit the area a low level players can explore, which in turns introduces a sense of progress.

Second point and tiered system are to again, introduce more limit, right now we can easily get smith to 100 at fair early level, unless we put that limit on ourselves, which I consider a fault of the game system. The tiers from perk trees hardly limit leveling, again smithing is a good example. I think the reason behind tiered system is to give some grandness to the progress, for example the master mage quests. Paying gold might not feel as grand as questing, but makes sense for lower tiers, plus serve as a gold sink.

I think your ideas about lockpicking are better, this game is designed to allow different routes of problem solving.

I think pickpocketing is just way to easy at the moment.

I'm actually "designing" a mod that rebalances and redoes the perks/level progression with skills. See my signature for a link.

Though my mod design ideas are more for doing what your thread title implies (i.e. only redoing the perks and skill progression balance), instead of adjusting things like monster leveling - something I feel is better suited to a different mod, for those who perfer just skill progression changes.

True a lot of thoughts are about enemies and making the mod modular is better.

Only link I can see is Smithing and loots from enemies.

The problem with smithing progression seem to be the way XP is awarded for crafting and this extends to other skills as well. A more balanced system would alleviate most of the grievances just as well as making it tiered.

EDIT: As an example. At a smithing skill of 70+ an iron dagger still takes a noticeable chunk of the progress bar and I even have a pacing rebalance which basically makes smithing level half as slow.

The "more balanced system" you mention is to reduce experience gain from making low level items at high skill level? For example give very little if none experience at Smithing 70 when making Iron Dagger? It seems to be very much akin to tiered proposal really.

Actually if I am right the required XP already gets larger as you get better at a skill.
So if the XP rewards are better balanced from the get go, rather than the same for every item (as far as I can tell, there is little to no difference in crafting an iron dagger, iron armor or glass battle-axe) than leveling should take care of iron dagger spam-crafting itself.
Natural leveling flow, rather than scripting an XP stop/reduction.