I like the perks. I'm glad they added them.

Combination of the old and new system? Could work.

Perks are fine if they were implemented more creatively, It must have been a struggle to fill the constellation charts.
The prerequisites are what kill it for me & take away any feeling of seamless progression & make it feel tacked on, I utterly resent having to pick perks that do not fit my character & it cripples my enjoyment.
If you have the skill you should have the perk option(not including the progressive perks naturally), Punishing a player for making a specific build is petty & pointless.

Thankfully i use a mod that gets rid of that & the game feels much more natural, I am happy with the perks system in principle(I was happy with OB's attributes as well) but it could do with some serious improvement.

I like the perks more than attributes and a few more skills. Though there is still a lot to improve in the perk system, they should get rid of useless perks and reduce the amount of perks you get to like 1 per 2 levels or something.

I use the community uncapper to get a second perk every other level so I have a few extra perk points for these useless gateway perks as well as new perks added by mods like Dwemer Certified.

All in all though, the system is fine but some of the perk trees themselves are questionable. Some perk trees like lockpicking seem worthless as the abundance of available lockpicks relative to locks to pick insures that there is no lock I can't get through. So what if it takes me twenty picks to get past a master lock? I have a couple hundred of 'em and acquire more than I use.

Perks replace the small bonuses you'd get in Oblivion when you reached level 25, 50, 75 and 100 in any skill. In my opinion, it does its job pretty well for a huge amount of reasons:

- there are much more perks, not just 4 per skill;
- it lets you define your character without picking any classes or birthsigns;
- they let you mix up play styles as much as you want;
- they really demonstrate how the player is advanced in certain skills;
- they show how powerful your character is;
- they give you the real sense of character progression;
- gives you total control of your character;
- they are just AWESOME!

As for those who whine about the "useless" ones, it would be just too easy if you could just go there and pick the perk you want right away. Sometimes you have to make some sacrifices and waste points on things you don't want in order to get those you want.

It's decent for a prototype, but could use a lot more work before I would really call it good.

Idk... The parts of the Perk system that you are seeing as flaws, I just don't see them that way. I see it as a logical course of progression of the character.

You start out knowing a little bit of nothing about everything. But as you level and spend Perk points, even when just working through the "worthless" Perks, you eventually become a Master at one or two things while being good at a lot of other things.

I think it's just a part of the "learning curve".

wait...don't they usually remove stuff to "please the casuals"? But they replaced attributes with perks what can actually do something useful...and that isn't removing...

But thats probably just some kind of conspiracy to streamline this game series even more! they added perks so that they can remove them in the next game! OMFG ITS ALL CLEAR NOW /tinfoilhat

-There should be no "ranked Perks"
-Perks should provide an ongoing benefit to your character
-Perks should add specialization to your character. They should provide new abilities or spells, not just modify current ones or effectiveness.
-They should go back to the system of picking Primary, Major, and Minor skills. Depending on which category you picked for your skill will dictate the modifier placed on it. For example, Armsman is a 5 Rank perk, each rank increases One-Hand damage by 20% up to 100%. Going to this model, if you picked One-Hand as your primary you would receive a 100% increase to 1H damage from the get go. This frees up many Perk points for more interesting selections that truly add specialization.

The problem I see with Perks are they are uninteresting. They do not add much specialization, in the sense define how my character controls and plays within the world. The only difference really if I invest in One-Hand or not is damage and efficiency. Being specialized should give me more combat abilities and options. This creates a more dynamic and fun combat system and allows the game to be balanced infinitely better as you do not have the deplorable scaling issue due to enchants.

Anything but that.
That svcked. It was like communism. Good on paper, but not in practice.
I would always put the skills I would use as minor's to avoid the crippling scaling I would get from being good at speech and jumping.

Uhm you do realize that you don't have to build your scaling system around this right? Just because that is how level scaling worked then does not mean that is what I advocate. You can still have it to where the skills you use level you up as your skills increase AND pick Primary, Major, Minor skills. This is a hybrid system between what you have now and what we had before. The plus side to this is that you can get a sense of your class and character identity early on, instead of much much later in the game as it is now. By the time my character is established, the game is so painfully trivial it hurts my heart.

I like the system but a lot of perks are really bland. The vast majority of them are boring and simply up numbers.

My biggest problem with the perks is that it feels like the gutted other aspects of the game in order to boost them up. First the axed attributes. Some people like to claim that perks replace attributes, but they really don't. Sure, a lot of their derived affects are still present, but it's not the same. There's no longer an overall, general governing factor. Then they cannibalized skills, tearing out much if their influence and putting them into perks like Armsman. Now, while skills do have some influence, it's been minimized and progression is almost entirely through perks.

What perks SHOULD have done is focused on specialization within each skill. As it is now, most perks are very general with only a handful of perks for specializing. Many consider them to be not worth the points, though. It needs to be reversed. There should be very few general perks with a lot more specialization perks. And the end perks should all be game changers. Things that people really want. Conjuration has this with the two summons at a time. Enchanting has this with the dual enchants. But when I look at one-handed, Paralyzing Strike has never seemed all that important. It's easy to do without and I seldom take it.

In the Fallout games they let us have too many perks. In Skyrim I feel we get too few. Unless you max out a character to get to 80, which few will do, it's really difficult to fill more than one or two trees. Playing my thief I have to make so many compromises and totally skip putting points into things I would like to enhance. I mean for a thief I'd like to, at some point, have stealth, 1h, light armor, alchemy, pickpocketing, and lockpicking all filled or at least close to it. those are the specialties that apply to my character. Why should I not have enough points to fill them? However my character uses no magic, 2h, heavy armor ect, and I refuse to level those areas just to get points. So I must do without certain talents that are specific to my class or put up with weaknesses in other areas as I spread points around. It is impossible to make a complete character without doing things that character would never do.

There should be some other way to access perk points. I'm all for limiting points to keep us from being able to have everything. I just think they took it too far this time. This is where the computer guys are lucky with the mods. I wish I was still on PC just for things like this. On the console I'm stuck with the crappy perk system. It's the one and only thing I don't like about playing on the console with this game.

the perks are exactly as I envisioned and played in 2011, I've had my opposition to this since the beginning, as stated the Perks need to stop trying to be replacers for Char definition and act as thier names state BONUSES for advancements in Skills, a Bonus for the player to get more out of particular Skills not to seek their definition from or even worse, to make the skill useful. I'd also add general perks that change the way you play activey/directly. not silly percentage increases....

There also needs to be a different method to acquire "points" for perks or even just perks in general...

It's fine IMO, though I could stand it being expanded.

That's my opinion too.

The Speech tree is useless because there's always something better to spend a perk on and it actually hampers your ability to sell things (due to the fact that you get paid more for items) until you get to the perk that allows you to invest. But that's what, 5 or 6 perks? It just doesn't fit it with any of the possible classes. When my Destruction Magic is having a hard time knocking down Mudcrabs, I'm not going to be spending perks on speech.

The Lockpicking one is probably the most useless. With enough lockpicks, you can open every lock in the game as long as it doesn't require a key. Throw in an enchanted necklace and/or ring and it elminates the entire need for the tree altogether. Same with pickpocekting but to a lesser degree.

But that leaves what, about a dozen trees that are very useful and properly contextual? I can live with that.

The perk system was great, except the perks weren't so great.
Example: lockpicking is near useless.
The only decent perks are the ones that might give you better loot and the one that makes your pick unbreakable.
You don't need the other perks when you have an unbreakable lockpick.

I find that the perk system is not perfect, and maybe there is other equivalent gameplay systems, but that it is a good one.
Not hard to understand and look around it
Easy to use and for future level planning
Even if some may seem "useless" i find them generally good enough for midlevel reward and the fact that one of their "effect" is to allow the higher strong ones.

The only bad thing i would find on the system, is not the system itself, but the balance of "templates" needs. Where a Mage character may need many tree to reach "perfection" and a thief or melee style can manage to achieve "perfection" with less perk points and use secondary perks.

This.
Basically, it's a great idea, but terrible execution.

Never liked them. Especially in Fallout 3, F:NV and Skyrim. In Oblivion somehow I felt the character development made more sense. But generally speaking I despise perks. I prefer stats development, like in Dark Souls. And I can't stand the lockpicking perks. What a waste of skill points. I kept the daedric lockpick until near platinum thus no need for developing the skills.

Its okay, i think it can be improved on tho and im sure they will improve it

dont like perks. perks are meant to be perks, not the entire base of which to make your character, they do not replace attributes well and they are boring (+x% damage with one-handed weapons is boring, perks should be interesting like in fallout [flirting options, criticals turn people into gore piles, the guardian angle, ect] but a bit more original)

You know, thinking about it, I think people really need to stop calling them perks. They're not. They have very little in common with the perks from Fallout and so they shouldn't be compared with them. In Skyrim, what we have more more along the lines of skill trees, much like you get in the Diablo series. The reason is that almost all meaningful progression comes from them, effectively replacing your actual skills.