I'm totally going to play a 100% mage build this play through. Oh look, conjuring! Oh hey cool, a bow I can summon. What's this muffle spell? a few levels later GOD DAMN IT SNEAKY ARCHER PLAY THROUGH AGAIN
Draugr with three arrows in his body: definitely nothing to see here
Honestly, with >400hrs in Skyrim (VR+pancake), I can't deny that falling back on sneaky WMDs is a fully viable solution to many hurdles along other builds' leveling paths. Unless you're holding yourself to a "no ranged, no sneak" run, it's simply irrational to avoid it at multiple points throughout the game. đââď¸
Personally, I don't see why the gripe is still active. No one has any room to judge how anyone else enjoys their fully offline, single-player games. đ¤đź Especially in this era.
Find your happy places wherever you can. Shit everywhere is pretty fucked. Let others be happy, and you'll get there, fellow lemmings âand more easily. đ
But it is a problem if you end up optimizing the fun out of the game and don't have fun.
And yet, it's still no one else's problem, to be clear. đ
Skyrim fight system are shit and magic lacks variety and punch that's why the way of least resistance is a one hit kill without being noticed.
Mods male being a mage fun.
If a game allows me to (ab)use stealth mechanics and fight unnoticed at range, I'm absolutely going to do it.
Why would I want to fight you up close? I might get blood on me, positively ghastly. No thanks, I'll do it from over here.
If it was good enough for Truman in WWII then it should be good enough for Skyrim
The Elder Scrolls: WWII
It's been eons since I touched Skyrim.
But I did do some enchanted two axe berserker build that plowed through everything like butter. Honestly got boring just mulching through every encounter without any strategy. Probably why I quit.
That's how I was with paladins in diablo 2 LoD. I would try making a zealer or some other different build but always come back to the hammerdin cause its so cheesy lol.
I once played through like that by prohibiting all bow use for myself, just have to be consistent at first and then you get used to selling all arrows because you finally don't need to hoard them anymore.
I made an actual roleplay class in the oblivion remaster recently. Conjuring equipment only assassin. Sell all weapons and armour, travel light. No offensive magic either. Seemingly unarmed and harmless, then suddenly armour and dagger appears out of nowhere
It's a very shit build, especially because nobody cares if you're armed or not, but it was interesting to play
Guy did a challenge video on beating the Winterhold questline without any spells, and it was pretty much only possible because the Dragonborn DLC adds a sword that does a swing blast thing that counted enough for the literally one section that needed you to cast something with no alternatives.
Just background noise? I swear I watched a video of his doing that exact thing.
That guy has very similar kinds of challenges, but the video I watched was from ymfah.
Checked comments just to see if anyone mentioned that person. I liked their Thieves Guild Without Stealing video.
The best cure for Stealth Archery is playing on the harder difficulties where it won't one-shot everything.
This is also a cure for liking Skyrim because the hardest difficulties just think more HP equals more harder.
I've also just found that aiming to finish dungeons fast will cure stealth archery. Level your destruction, put on the Hotline Miami soundtrack and go to town.
My dude, if you spam the crouch button while at 100 stealth you can stand on the face of people and they won't see you. You legit can hit them with a dagger for x30 dmg (off handing a mace for stupid dmg) and they don't recognize your existence. Oh, you do onehsot them with that tho. But still.
100 stealth completely breaks the game.
talks about stealth daggery for some reason like a big fucking nerd
Not to mention the Illusion magic is severely underrated for much the same reasons...
You don't even need to Stealth anymore. Just make them peaceful and land a dagger strike. Rinse and repeat.
The reason is that it stops working in late game. Enemies over X level aren't affected by the highest lvl of the paricy version iirc.
Higher difficulties made me do stealth archer more. Needs multiple hits to take down this now very dangerous enemy? I'm not doing that in melee, or with some limited resources like a mage. I'm flinging pointy sticks from inside the walls.
Why would I use words when giant stick
How do you know you can do that, though?
The player is basically Talos manifest in flesh. That's why the game is so compelling in the first place: you think you don't want to align with the Imperials because they tried to kill you. You really don't want to align with the Imperials because they banned worship of you. The Stormcloaks support Talos worship, but they're dogshit otherwise, though I would argue that Ulfric Stormcloak is the rightful High King of Skyrim. The Stormcloaks are ultimately right, but they're just shit people. If they weren't racist, if we got that entirely out of their culture, if Windhelm was a melting-pot of Nordic and Dunmer culture, the choice would be easy, but then it wouldn't be such a heavy choice to make that we do not have a clear consensus 15 years later. (Shit, I just realised today is 15 years to the day since it released, 11-11-11, which is accurate no matter how you write the date (for me, 2011-Nov-11).)
If that doesn't change your mind, consider the urchin added by Hearthfire who lives in Windhelm is based on Aerith from Final Fantasy VII. Tell me she isn't. Red dress. Sells flowers. Dad was killed in the war. (Okay, we don't know who Aerith's dad was. It was the husband of the woman who took her in, who was killed in the war. Close enough!)
So yeah, Talos reincarnated theory. Never proven, but it does explain how we can know everything for a second playthrough.
Note that Starfield actually does address this with its NG+ mode. You can't really explain the divine knowledge in Fallout 4 (or any other Fallout), but Elder Scrolls games have the Talos/Akatosh reincarnated theory, and Starfield has its NG+ directly address the situation.
Well, I don't want to align with the Empire because they're an empire. I don't really like the Stormcloaks either, and the Dominion isn't really good for anyone. If it weren't for the poor blind people of Skyrim (bless their 12 second memories), I might have to side with Alduin.
There's a DLC idea. Become the champion Miraak could never be and show the Dominion how to stage an invasion!
That's just because magic in Skyrim is a joke.
Let's see you try that in Morrowind (and if not the Mage's guild questline, the House Telvanni one).
Yeah, the lack of damage scaling means magic is only really viable in the early and mid game. By the time youâre level 40 or 50, the damage potential for magic has dropped off so drastically that youâre basically forced into using other styles.
Because with every other style of combat in the game, your damage scales based on your level. A higher One-Handed skill means you do more damage with one-handed weapons. But this isnât the case with magic. With a higher Destruction skill, you simply use less MP to cast your Destruction spells. But the damage of those spells doesnât change. Which means that as you level up and enemies begin to get stronger, you need to cast more and more spells to take them down.
If an enemy has 30 health and youâre doing ~8-10 damage per hit, that means you take them down in 3 or 4 hits. And if your damage scales based on your level, maybe youâll be doing 80-100 damage when the enemies have 300 health. Itâs still 3 or 4 attacks to take down an enemy. Higher stakes, but youâre hitting harder. But that isnât the case with magic. If you have a spell that deals 20 damage, it always deals 20 damage. The only thing that changes the damage is the enemyâs particular resistances. So if you cast a spell that deals 20 damage, youâll initially take that 30 HP enemy down in roughly 2 hits. But then when that enemy has scaled to 300 HP, youâre using ~15 casts to take it down.
And on the surface, this seems fine. After all, you have more MP now, and youâre using less MP per cast. Except that each cast takes time, which means that enemy is getting 5x longer to wail on you. And the enemies do more damage now too, (because their attacks scale to their level), so now youâre getting downed in 3-4 hits and canât effectively kill anything before it reaches you.
And sure, the game has other ways to mitigate that issue. Armor spells like stone skin, wards, turn undead, etc⌠Except all of those are just ways to prolong or avoid a fight. They donât actually help you end it any faster.
I wasn't even thinking about damage scaling; I was just thinking about how in Morrowind you have to levitate to get up to the upper parts of Telvanni buildings and stuff like that.
I will never forgive them for taking away levitation.
That's why you are supposed to cast higher-level spells or create your own. It's not ideal, but doable.
What's really broken are spells that have a level cap; those become useless fast.
I played the first part of Tainted Grail pure dual wield because damage was monstrous. Bow play is much more difficult in that game. Now I'm doing summoner (with limit increase) and it's fun sending an army to clean up enemies.
Yeah, the system in Morrowind always felt a bit peculiar, where they would only let you advance in the guild, if you had at least one spellcasting skill on level 40 or such.
But not having it was weirder in retrospect, because your character just feels like a mercenary more than anything else. Unless you strictly role-play, you can quickly end up just doing anything that gives money.
Spellsword is my bread and butter for fantasy.
I like to larp that I am smarter than I am. So what if I have a spell but no stats for it? Just snort simpleton's spice until the spell drops a few notches.
Squirt of lemon
Humor, jokes, memes about TTRPGs
