This is a balance problem that hurts the gameplay experience of those who powerplay. If you roleplay and limit yourself then the problem isn't big.

I hope Bethesda improves the balance with patches. Otherwise console players just have to put limits to themselves. PC players can fix the balance problem with mods.

Meh, apparently some people find it irritating to utilize self control. Oh well.

Heroine addicts?

Reality TV stars?

An easy solution would be to overpower some NPCs and badguys, or make reaching that level 100 skill with all the perks HARDER.

With the first solution you've got some epic badguys who could never be killed so easily and make a level 40 character with quite a few perks feel like a level 1 char against a giant. So you need to be level 60 to even consider facing this guy.

WIth the second solution lets say you do grind one skill and get pretty overpowered... Make it so the game recognizes this and exploits your weaknesses, just like us players do to the game and its enemies. So say you craft the best armor in the world... so enemies attack you and realize wow this guy can't feel my attacks.... like ghosts in oblivion couldn't be hurt by normal weapons you have to adapt. The npc's should realize this and switch to spell based attacks. Not right away but hey after giving it their best a few times and the player keeps coming... they should change tactics. Also someone comes walking into a store wearing the best gear ever... they smell of money. I raise my prices for this jerk cause he's apparently rich. It would take a little work, but the designers could make overpowered characters suffer in their weaker areas pretty easily.

I don't actually think that the people posting the "XXXX is so OP" threads are actually players...I think that in reality that are either: a. Developers from competing companies; or b. A secret sect of internet trolls.

I like those ideas, and have often thought of similar things.

Overall, I think one of the major issues, aside from the poor AI and perk balancing, is the level cap and enemy statistical balance. On one hand, having such a high cap in the base game is quite nice, but on the other hand, it is also a problem when the game does not have any content designed to challenge it. Enemies grow at a mostly linear rate, while players jump up very differently. The symptom of which, is that enemies are always having to cut corners playing catch up.

I think, if they reintroduced more complexity to the combat mechanics, it would help quite a bit. For example, separating physical damage into blunt, slash, and pierce, and dividing armor so that it defends against those damage types in varying amounts. As well as certain types of armor, like say, Daedric....having inherent resistant modifiers on it, like say....reducing fire damage, but making the player more vulnerable to cold and lightning which Daedra traditionally are weak to.

Instead of having just one type of armor rating, and outgoing physical damage, you would have to learn to react and adapt to certain things. A huge Dwemer contraption, perhaps could be highly resistant to slash and pierce damage, making it much more difficult to kill it with such weapons. In addition, it could deal heavy piercing damage with a lance like protrusion, causing punishing damage to the player if the armor they are wearing is particularly vulnerable to that kind of attack.

A damage reduction system, on top of damage threshold system would also help as well. Not only would we have to overcome a certain treshold to inflict any damage, but beyond that the damage could be further mitigated.

Why would a competing developer care if someone else's game has broken or ill thought out mechanics? If anything, they would encourage it more to further sabotage the game.

People like options, but if you look at the inevitable responses "Why should I have to do anything I don't want to", it becomes apparent that what they want aren't choices so much as only the choices they like.

My inevitable response is, if you really want a challenging game, then you have the ability to make it so for yourself. If you do not want to exercise that choice, or petulantly refuse to, as so many do here, then one can only conlude the real blame does not lie at Bethesdas door, but rather, at the person staring back at you in the mirror. Maybe some of you need to grow up a little and realise the world doesn't revolve around what you want.

Here we go again...

There seems to be a complete misunderstanding of what's being asked for here, so I'll try to clarify.

What the OP wants (as do several of us here) is for the game's difficulty levels to actually live up to the names. Unfortunately they don't do so, with the result that even Master difficulty is trivialized once you have top-end gear. That Master difficulty even can be trivialized is a travesty of design that should have been corrected during testing, but for whatever reason it wasn't.

The upshot of this is that those seeking to retain even the semblance of challenge have to gimp their characters, which should not be necesary with a properly calibrated difficulty scale. it has nothing to do with lack of self-control or desire for hand-holding, as neither of those are applicable, and everything to do with desire for higher difficulty settings to actually be difficult, so that there will still be at least some challenge left for high-level characters with end-game gear.

Doesn't say much for "advlt" gamers these days that they act like spoiled children....

The game doesn't force you, you force yourself. Don't blame the game just because you want to avoid something. Being Master in a skill would mean you're the best you can be which in turn means that you can smith the best armour, enchant everything to ridiculous levels, make the most of any alchemy ingredient you find, etc...

Every time this topic comes up, I can't help but thinking of someone sitting there, jabbing a fork into their forehead with tremendous vigour.

"Ow-this-ow-really hurts-ow!"
"Why don't just not do that then?"
"Ow-but I don't-ow-want to, nobody-ow-should force-ow-me to do anything-ow"
"But you don't even like doing it"
"Ow-Bethesda-ow-gave me the fork-ow-I'm gonna-ow-use it"
"Ooooooooookay...."

The irony is, most of the people complaining about the fork would then proceed to venomously attack Bethesda if they took it away, with claims of "dumbing down", and "Console players have ruined it" (and don't forget the inevitable "rooned my immersions"), all the while jabbing away with the forks replacement.

"Ow-Damn you-ow-Bethesda, the spoon-ow-is crap-ow-gives us back the FORK!"

That's because Bethesda has shown that they are lazy and incompetent when it comes to balancing. Instead of actually solving the problem, they either shift it in the completely opposite direction, putting the imbalance elsewhere, or they remove it entirely because they're too lazy to actually expend the effort to make it work.

Look at spellcrafting. It could be ridiculous, but many people liked it. Yet instead of fixing what was actually wrong, they took it away because they didn't know what to do. A knee-jerk reaction instead of moderation. They took an axe, to a problem that needed a scalpel.

how hard is it to understand that at the highest difficulty level the game should be DIFFICULT! seriously.

it has nothing to do with forks, handholding, complaining or self control. those are not arguments. those points of view are false. they don't apply.

if you use them you are not only wrong, but, are avoiding the pure fact that beth made a game where the buyers of their product have to go out of their way to make the game difficult at higher levels because the developers didn't.

that is the complete opposite of how it should be. period.

those of us that realize this obvious problem in skyrim are simply pointing out that fact. as well, it takes very little time to actually come up with some easy remedies to implement.

you can keep retreading the invalid responses i listed above, but, none of them will change the fact that the difficulty level is abysmal and that i have to not pick those things that would obviously be best for my character because beth dropped the ball.

edit- and this is coming from a guy who LIKES the game. but liking the game has nothing to do with recognizing the faults of the game and wishing they were fixed.

that's obvious though. I don't know where else the gimp-yourself crowd is popular, but I never agreed with that. Yes you can roleplay, yes there are a few technical exploits which you can avoid concsiously to make it balanced(chameleon 100 in oblivion was one of those), but the game has to set the limits and i have to be able to try hard to find my way. The difficulty slider is for how hard. That's how it works.

Honestly? I really hope they don't end up listening to people with your thoughts, or else the next game will be something like "Diablo".

What you want is a game that pre-defines a character for you. What you would call a Class.

It seems that you look for something like:

"Hi there Skyrim, I want to play a Warrior".
"Ok... You want to be a heavy warrior, or light warrior?"
"Hmmm... heavy".
"Paladin-like warrior, or Craft-like warrior?"
"Lets play craft"
"OK, there you go: One handed, blocking, heavy armour, merchandise and Smithing"
"Hey... but.. how am I going to open the chest with all those cool treasures?"
"You can't, you're a WARRIOR"
"But... but... hey, and I can't sneak past these guys!! It's dark! I'm sneaking! But they detect me!"
"Well obviously.. you're a WARRIOR".
"Oh shhh....."

I can be THAT warrior without the game telling me. I can ignore all skills except the 4-5 I choose to play with. And when I say "ignore" I mean don't use them, don't learn them, and don't invest perks on them.

Another example? You want to play a thief. You choose to play as an archer. Well, OK, the game creates you a character with Sneaking, Lockpicking, Pickpocket, Archery and Light armor. "Hey! I can't put on that cool daedric armour!!". Well, of course, you DON'T have the heavy armour skill. "What about that healing restoration spell? Why can't I learn it??".... "You don't have Restoration skill". In Skyrim you could. In fact you could wear the daedric, sneak, one-shot-kill and still heal yourself with magic. But anyway later you would complain because "the game" is unbalanced and you are overpowered.

The only thing unbalanced or overpowered is the char, not the skill system.


The game does not force YOU to put limits. They give you a game world, and a big skill set, so you can use it without pre-set class limitations. It's not them who force you to anything. It's YOU the one that HAS to select a play style and a char type. You can't pretend to use all skills and magics available with the same char.

I don't know what is so hard to understand about that.

If I want to play a game with Imbalanced game-play then I start up Saints row and not Skyrim. People here say: This game does not force you to do anything, avoid it if you don't like it. Yet this points out that the game forces me to avoid perks, skills and what not if i want to play my way.

Yeah, so ? You get to play it your way, isnt that the important thing? Just like if you want to play a warrior type, you avoid the magic skills. Does the game force you to develop magic skills if you don't want to use them?
No, it doesn not, just like it doesn't force you to do anything else. You want a straight up mage who has no martial arts skills and can't swing a hammer well enough to make a spoon? You can do that. And whatever skills you do take, you are not forced to develop them to the point of godhood if you don't want to, just don't assign them any perks. The game NEVER makes you spend points on any perk. You could play a whole game withpout using a single point, if that's the way you want to do it. You can make the game as difficullt or as easy as you want by the way you play outside of using the difficulty slider. You are not forced to play a certain way, you are given the OPTION to do so.

isn't this what happens in every game? when you bested your abilities you become overpowered, think about god of war end-game combos, or red dead redemption final weapons and dead eye.
so yea, in skyrim when you best abilities you are overpowered, duh?!

Sure, I can also pretend to play a hobbit. I would crouch all the time and be putting all perk points into speech and mercantile, buying ingredients to cook and raise my alchemy.

This would be purposefully and willingly avoiding perks and skills for RP purpose, that's my decision.

Avoiding perks and skills to play a main build like the thief without making things to easy is being forced to ignore content.

According to you it comes down to this: You either go with the flow and be overpowered or skip skills and perks, and missing out content, just to get things balanced out.

I do not think they will balance the game for those that meta game by using all three crafting skills to make uber gear.Those peoples best hope is a mod.

For those that do that if you do it and you know that you do not like the end result why do it?

I want to play Skyrim as an RPG. If I limit myself, it's not enjoyable as an RPG anymore.

Let me tell you what: the players go, give his money to buy the game and then go and play it.
The devs design the game, make it and release it to get that money.
Guess whose responsibility is to balance the game and make it enjoyable as an RPG beyone level 35-ish...




Yes, you can choose to. Why would you though. You are merely pretending that your warrior cannot lockpick or use magic - but no matter how hard you pretend, he CAN use pretty much everything. So why would he/she, as a thinking person, not use them?
Why would your thief not use daedric stuff when he can use them just as fine as leather? Why not use restoration while he KNOWS how to cast restoration spells?
Can you explain that? How does it make sensse, apart from your character being intentionally blind to his/her abilities or having phobias about magic and lockpicks and stuff?

Yes, of course you should eventually be overpowered, but this should happen at level 60, when you go out to hunt the optional big bosses hidden in the game world... not at level 30, when you are still haven't even killed your first dragon...

You're using your defintion of fun and thinking that everyone must feel he same way.
This game is designed so everyone can enjoy any level of difficulty they desire.


Why is it that you think that by not spending perk points...you're making yourself "underpowered"?
All you're doing is creating a character with a different ability and skill level.

There is no "underpowered" or "overpowered" in this game.
There are choices in character creation and development that lead to a certain skill level. The skill level that YOU choose.

When the someone says this:

and this:

... all in the same post, then "if you don't like it, then don't use it" is a fair response. Some players do like it.