That may be true, but when you can pick a master lock at level 1 with 15 in your lockpicking skill and all you need are 10-20 picks which are easy to find and cheap to buy the skill is pretty useless as well as the perks, except for maybe RP reasons.

For an open spell to open a Master lock would require your Alteration skill to be almost at 100 (not sure when vendors would have that spell to buy, but well above 70's at least, I would think Guess you need to have your skill at 90 to get access to master spells in Skyrim and need to do a quest as well). Much different than opening locks at level 1 with no lockpicking skill.

a pure thief should perk it tho, at least for getting the perk that lets you loot more money and find more rare items, that's kinda useful and you can use armors and weapons you find in chests instead of perking up smithing and enchanting, so its not exactly useless as you may think

Would like to see a poll on how many players actually put perks into the lockpicking skill and whether it was for RP reasons or the reasons you listed (rare items, more loot).

I think you would be amazed at how many people don't put perks into Lockpicking. Or maybe I would be on how many do, but I don't think many do.

I don't, mostly because I don't care how other people play their games.
The only thing I can tell you is that its not useless, as you assumed only because you and most people don't use it
The only "useless" perk in it is the "unbreakable" for the reason you stated, you find too many lockpicks, all the others are somehow useful, both for role playing a thief and for a regular play

about useless perks then what you think about the head cutting one? that triggers the head cut animation when you kill someone who was gonna die anyway, tell me how useful is that?

The mini game is as easy as stealing candy from a five year old imho. Lock picking is laughably easy even at level 1, except perhaps for master locks.

If anything that mini game should have been much more difficult, and still make it gradually easier to use as you lock pick skill progresses. Also, there should have been perks to determine what lock levels you can actually unlock. As it is, the lock picking skill is pretty much useless.

And anyhow, an unlock spell wouldn't have made the lock picking skill useless. You'd have to skill up to be able to master the spells, more skill = higher lock levels. The same can be said for lock bashing. Lock picking, unlock spells, and lock bashing can perfectly exist all at bhe same time without one rendering the other obsolete, as long as they're done properly.

This made me think of something. Another reason why open spells would not make lockpicking obsolete is that there are no perks in alteration to give you the bonuses that perks in the Lockpicking skill does. Combine that with a better designed lockpicking minigame (to actually encourage people to take perks and level the skill) and I think it would be better.

But crafting and the ease at which you can get money in the game kind of defeats some of the perks when you can make better than what you find in the chest and later game have more money than you could ever use.

A pure Mage that uses only magic to open locks would have to level up his Alteration skill in order to open higher level locks. This wasn't a problem in Oblivion because the locks would "level up" with the player (the infamous scaled leveling). In Skyrim, however, you can find higher level locks even if you're a low level character. A Mage then would be forced to resort to lockpicking in order to open higher level locks, which is essentially how the game works right now. Players who like to play as pure mages would complain then that they're forced to resort to lockpicking, especially because the juicier loot is in those better chests that they wouldn't be able to open with spells.

Because if they ever thought about it in the first place it was dismissed because they thought the mainstream mass market lowest common denominator(there target audiance) would be confused by it.


Oh so they'd never think of "hey we have to come back later when we have the abiolity to open this." eh?

My current warrior has not picked a single lock yet,he has no interest in being a thief.
My previous character, a thief perked lockpicking alot.It was for roleplaying purposes and for getting more gold and better loot in chests.

there's a big differance between lock picking dungeon loot and thief lock picking....XD

Not to get off-topic but because you asked, according to the talent description, it adds 25% bonus damage in addition to decapitation. So technically it is more useful than all of the lock picking talent tree.
Yes I agree with OP. The lock-picking skill is rendered useless once you master the lock-pick mini game! If they wanted lock-picking to be unique and useful as a skill it should have worked as a % chance to open based on your skill level and talent allocation. Compare it to blacksmithing. I can not smith dragon armor without the Dragon Armor Talent. Even with 100 smithing I can only craft a few things if I have no talents allocated to smithing.

The game at times shows serious inconsistency, evident in the talent tree especially.

The OP is right, mages used to have open lock spells, they worked fine because they required appropriate levels of alteration skill to open equal level chests. Why this was removed is beyond me.

If it's not broken, don't fix it.

meh, I like it as is, if lockpicking isn't your thing use the Tower stone. There was a reason it was put in the game and if every class could open locks no one would take the Tower stone in my current playthough I used the tower stone up to level 12 or so and then switch to the Atronach once I started to need the additional magic defense. At that point I had made enough money off loot to not have to pick every lock.

Midas magic mod

While I agree with everything said so far (and I added some of my own earlier), I don't think the lockpicking perks are completely useless. If you have perks to waste (and you don't want to overpower the other skills) investing into the lockpicking skill reduce the time and complexity of the minigame, espceially with expert/master locks. I know it's something minor but I end up picking 300-400 locks per playthrough so everything that help me reduce time spent in boring tasks is welcome.

There is another way to open a locked door or chest without using Lockpicks.

Tell your companion to open it. He/she won't open things if it means stealing - but if you're not a thief, you shouldn't be concerned about that.

Because having an open spell would make lockpicking useless and it would also be too easy to get the items in the chest.

well, that probably because you play a super kickass warrior that goes around cutting heads, which I did on my first char as well and got tired around lvl50 because on master level i had overpowered greatsword and daedra armor and was 3-shotting ancient dragons.

by playing a sneak-bow light armor thief the lockpicking tree is not useless as you may think, helps you find more arrows and magic bows and armor, as well as money to buy daedric arrows, and you pick locks in 5 seconds

but well as I said, it depends on how you play, but that doesn't mean that you can assume it is useless only because you don't use it or you read on forums it's useless

am I wrong?

The reason? "Balance"
They basically don't want a whole skill to be obsolete.
Which is rediculous, as Lock/Unlock spells could be put in Alteration and bash in weapon skills.
What if a perk was required to be able to bash locks, like Lock Basher. Allowing you to open a lock if your One-handed or Two-handed was over so and so.
Here's an example.

0-20 skill - Novice lock
21-40 skill - Apprentice
41-60 skill - Adept
61-80 skill - Expert
81-100 skill - Master

One perk low on the skill tree to enable it, the rest based on skill.

Yes, its easy. However having mage's, thieves and warriors have their own way of opening locks just makes it easier again. Rogues need their trade. They dont tend to use spells or fight one on one so why take that away from them?

Meh... whatever

Yes, you are. I played a mage. I was merely reading the description of the warrior talent in game. I found there was too much emphasis on locked doors/chests in the game for me too ignore the lock-picking skill all-together. But not enough for me to invest a single talent into the tree. I ended up with 100 picking and 0 talents in it at the end of my game. I never grinded the skill once either, it's just out of the need to use it so often and the ease of the picking game itself that it capped out at all.

There's something wrong there. When you compare it to other talent trees, and the example I gave was smithing; then you can see you can't do very much with smithing without talents, wheras you can do just about everything with lockpicking and no talents.

Who needs spells when you have the thieves guild.

Nonsense.
This is an RPG, not halo, there is literally no such thing as 'x makes y useless'.
The more roads there are to a single goal, the better, the more options, freedom and choice, the better.
No open lock means less options, means less replayability.

TES has bled too many features and is now a poor shadow of its former self. Its shallow, vapid and almost without replay value. Mages have been gimped beyond belief, its hardly any fun being a mage anymore.
These kinds of spells add meat to the series. Without any kind of coulour and flavour it is just bare bones. As Skyrim is.

Not in Skyrim.

You read my mind! My thief character haven't wasted time using perks to make lockpicking easier, it's already easy. This style of lockpicking needs to change, possibly to something resembling Fallout 3/NV. Once you can't pick a lock until your skill is high enough, split lockpicking styels into the 3 categories for a bit of flavor. I love being a thief, and seeing a tree dedicated to a crucial aspect of a thief not being used makes me sad.

If a lock HAS to be opened, they always give you a way to do it. There's a key or something somewhere. You can also get a companion to open locks. I play a mage and have opened some up to Master. Save, try, load when your lockpicks are gone. If you REALLY feel like you need to open it. Most of the time the reward is not that great anyway. I miss the open lock spell, and i do think BASH would be appropriate for warriors. But it's not that big a deal.